Take Control of Securing Your Mac

Keep your Mac safe from intruders, malware, and more!

Version 1.1, updated March 23, 2021

Secure your Mac against attacks from the internet and physical intrusion with the greatest of ease. Glenn Fleishman guides you through configuring your Mac to protect against phishing, malware, network intrusion, social engineering, and invaders who might tap physically into your computer. Glenn teaches how to secure your data at rest and in motion. Learn about built-in privacy settings, the Secure Enclave, FileVault, sandboxing, VPNs, recovering a missing Mac, and much more. Covers Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur.

The digital world has never seemed more riddled with danger, even as Apple has done a fairly remarkable job across decades at keeping our Macs safe. But the best foot forward with security is staying abreast of past risks and anticipating future ones. Take Control of Securing Your Mac gives you all the insight and directions you need to ensure your Mac is safe from external intrusion and thieves or other ne’er-do-wells with physical access.

Security and privacy are tightly related, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac helps you understand how macOS has increasingly compartmentalized and protected your personal data, and how to allow only the apps you want to access specific folders, your contacts, and other information.

Here’s what the book has to offer:

• Master a Mac’s privacy settings
• Calculate your level of risk and your tolerance for it
• Learn why you’re asked to give permission for apps to access folders and personal data
• Moderate access to your audio, video, and other hardware inputs and outputs
• Get to know the increasing layers of system security through Mojave, Catalina, and Big Sur
• Prepare against a failure or error that might lock you out of your Mac
• Share files and folders securely over a network and through cloud services
• Set a firmware password and control other low-level security options to reduce the risk of someone gaining physical access to your Mac
• Track and recover a Mac—or erase it remotely—if it’s lost or stolen
• Understand FileVault encryption and protection, and avoid getting locked out
• Investigate the security of a virtual private network (VPN) to see whether you should use one
• Learn how the Secure Enclave in Macs with a T2 chip or M-series Apple silicon affords hardware-level protections
• Dig into ransomware, the biggest potential threat to Mac users, but still a largely theoretical one
• Decide whether anti-malware software is right for you