

Ask HN: How do you protect your Mac? - dustyreagan

I'm wondering what other Hacker News users use to protect their macs from viruses and malware?
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jacktoole1
Personally: 1\. I run as a standard user (without sudo access), with a
separate administrator user (not named admin). I like Jeff Atwood's post on
this: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/the-windows-
securit...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/the-windows-security-
epidemic-dont-run-as-an-administrator.html)

To sudo I have to first su into my administrator user, then sudo. This would
have protected, for example, against the exploit a couple months ago that
allowed a virus to change a user's password (and then sudo with the changed
password).

For most graphical programs, I get a popup asking for my admin username and
password if the program wants access to system files.

2\. I use Chrome with plugins disabled by default. You can enable them
permanently per-site (for youtube and hulu, mostly), and when a site loads
that I want to run flash on, I just right click on the plugin to run it (or
run all from the URL bar). There are probably similar options in Safari and
Firefox

