Securing Leopard White Paper

Security researchers at Corsaire have published a white paper about securing Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. The document discuses user account management, general security settings for Mac OS X, logging and auditing, and using Common Criteria tools. While the document does not go into much depth, it does discuss the main security features that are inherent in Mac OS X.

Macworld Reviews ContentBarrier X4

Macworld today published a review of ContentBarrier X4, Intego’s parental control solution. They liked it a lot, giving it the high rating of four mice. The reviewer notable liked the program’s interface (”ContentBarrier’s interface is easy to understand”), its ability to block streaming media, and its scheduling features, especially compared to Leopard’s Parental Controls (”ContentBarrier offers more flexibility by allowing you to set a schedule by the hour”).

The review concludes with the following:

ContentBarrier X4 offers several valuable tools that Parental Controls lacks, such as hour-by-hour scheduling, an IM anti-predator filter, media stream blocking, and keyword filtering. If you have a hard time keeping up with your kids and maintaining Parental Controls, or if you have a small business where you want to cut down on non-work-related surfing, ContentBarrier X4 can be a big help.

Find out more about ContentBarrier X4 on this page.

Hundreds Snagged in MobileMe Phishing Scam

Computerworld reports that hundreds of MobileMe users have been taken in by a sleek phishing scam. Purporting to be from Apple, e-mail messages took advantage of the recent change from .Mac to MobileMe, telling users that they needed to update credit card information. Some 100-200 users were snagged in a single day, giving away credit card numbers, addresses, birth dates, passwords and more.

We reported this on August 12, when the first phishing e-mails were spotted in the wild, but the Computerworld article is a gauge of the success of this “campaign” in just a few days.

Remember that Apple will never send you a message asking you to log in to your account in this manner, and if you have any doubts, you should always log in directly to your account (in this case, by typing www.mobileme.com in your browser).

Office Updates Contains Security Fix; Blocked by Apple Security Update

Microsoft has released updates for its Office suite for Mac, with an update for Office 2004 and another for Office 2008. Both updates contain bug fixes, and include “fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer’s memory by using malicious code.”

However, it turns out that users who have installed Apple’s 2008-005 security update (released on July 31) may be having problems updating Office 2008. It seems that this security update “blocks an AppleScript from displaying a dialog to quit all running Microsoft applications in the current Microsoft Office 2008 updaters.” This post on the Entourage Help Blog explains the problem and the workaround: quit all Office applications before running the updater.

More Phishing Attacks Target MobileMe Users

Back in the last days of .Mac, before it was rebranded MobileMe, we wrote about phishing attempts to snare .Mac users. These e-mails were well-crafted, and mentioned that there was a billing problem with the recipient’s .Mac account.

Macworld is reporting that new phishing e-mails are being sent purporting to be from Apple for MobileMe users. Again, these are well-crafted, and may lead some users to click through their links and give up their credit card numbers.

As always, you should never click through to a link in this kind of e-mail message. If you think you may have to change your account information, sign into your MobileMe account directly, by typing the URL or using a bookmark.

Also, remember that Intego Personal Antispam can protect you from phishing e-mails by spotting when displayed URLs are different from the links behind them. But always check the URL in your browser when you click any link expecting to provide credit card information, just to be sure, and look for a padlock in your browser window showing that it is a secure page; hackers can’t spoof the padlock icon.

Can Apple Remotely Shut Down iPhone Apps?

Apple has, apparently, included a system in the iPhone that allows for applications to be remotely shut down. The iPhone’s operating system contains a URL for a page that, it seems, may contain a list of blacklisted applications. For now, there’s only a dummy entry on the page, but it’s possible that Apple will add applications to the list if any iPhone applications are found to be malicious.

This is an interesting concept: letting the manufacturer of a device decide which applications you can use. If the applications are, indeed, malicious, this is probably a Good Thing, but what if Apple decides, for some reason, to blacklist applications that it may think are evil but you want to use? Just like the way Apple is removing applications from the App Store without even informing the developers… Some see this as a reason to jailbreak your iPhone, so you can have full control of what you install.