• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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Burning a CD on OS X is trivial and involves no more software than finder. You stick in the blank CD, it shows up in finder, you drag the files you want to burn onto it and then click the little radioactive icon to burn the CD. Simple. However, if you go looking in finder to copy a CD you will be disappointed. Does this mean you need to install 3rd party software like Roxio Toast? Nope. The key lies in knowing how to use the Disk Utility app that comes with OS X.

Lets say you’ve just purchased a copy of a software app, for example, MS Office X, and you want to make a backup copy for when you inevitably loose or damage your disk, here is how you would do it, step by step.

First you need to stick the original CD into the drive and then launch Disk Utility which you will find in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. The icon is shown below:

When you have it open you will see all your hard disks in a tab down the left hand side as well as your CD/DVD drives and what ever CDs are in them. Select the disk you want to copy (shown below):

Then go to File -> New -> <Your Disk> (as shown below) and select a place on your hard disk to save this file. This will generate a ‘disk image’ from the CD you want to copy which you can then burn to a blank CD (as often as you want in fact, though not that you’d do such a thing with a copyrighted disk of course!).

This will take a while to complete but when it is done your saved disk image will show up in the bottom section of the left hand panel. To burn this image to a new CD eject the original CD and insert a blank one (if a window pops up asking you what to do with the blank disk click Ignore). When you have the CD inserted select the saved disk image as shown below and then click the Burn icon (yellow and black icon that looks like a radioactive sign at the top left) and away you go!

Well … I didn’t think it could get worse, but it has. My "broadband" is now running at about 8kbps, yes, eight KILO bytes per second. That’s not broad band …. it’s not even ISDN …. it’s not even twice dialup!

I have been defending DigiWeb up to now but bugger that. Since the 20th of January my broadband has been fucked, that’s almost two months! In that time DigiWeb have not even been able to tell me WHAT the problem is let alone what is being done to fix it or when it will be fixed. They seem to think that "it’s an Eircom problem" is still a sufficient answer to my questions at this stage. Well I have news for them IT ISN’T! It got me off their backs for a while but that is no longer a good enough answer.

I’ve been on to ComReg and got talking to a very nice lady there who explained to me that I can’t make a complaint about Eircom, that the only people who can are DigiWeb because they are Eircom Customers, not me. Basically, the ONLY people who have the power to sort out my line are DigiWeb and they are failing MISERABLY and what it worse they have not told me one thing to give me any confidence in them at all. They get annoyed with me when I ring and ask for update reports, apparently I’m being impatient! They are letting Eircom walk all over them and it is ME and other DigiWeb customers who are suffering.

Word of advice – if you’re thinking of getting broad band – DON’T get Eircom (their Customer ‘service’ is bad enough to be a health risk) and DON’T get DigiWeb, they are incapable of dealing with the service provider they use on your behalf to a satisfactory level.

There has been a lot of media hype in the last two weeks or so about OS X security and it seems to be sexy now to have a go at the mac. The amount of half-thought-out and poorly researched hype about OS X vulnerabilities of late is just astounding. To read some articles you’d swear that there was millions of destroyed macs littered all over the Internet. But there aren’t, there are two minor ‘viruses’, a vulnerability in a web browser, and a dubious hacking claim.

Two ‘Viruses’

So, what were these ‘viruses’, well, the first one, the wonderfully named "oompah loompah" virus (or Leap.A to be more formal) was a Trojan that spread it self via iChat. People had to open a file that they received via iChat to get infected. The second one allowed people with bluetooth devices to get too much access to your machine. Not good but the patch to fix this problem was released months before the virus so any sensible person was safe.

What can we learn from these two ‘viruses’:

1. Don’t open files you get from an un-trusted source
2. Keep your OS up to date

As for the first point, if you get a strange file from a strange person over ANY medium and you are stupid enough to open/run it you DESERVE to get your machine destroyed! Any file you run runs as YOU and has all the permissions YOU have so it can delete all YOUR files. That’s not a security problem that’s a fact of life on any OS. Programs you run can do what you can do and you can delete your own stuff!

The second point is another no-brainer. Linux and Unix are more secure than windows but ONLY if you keep them updated! Same goes for OS X, or any OS for that matter. Apple are very good at brining out security updates and patches, if your machine is going to be online INSTALL THEM!

You’ll notice that the two rules of thumb above are not OS X specific, they go for all OSes. Windows users have been aware of these realities for a long time, perhaps Mac users have not, well, they should have been!

One Vulnerability

The Safari vulnerability however was more worrying. In this case Apple did something stupid and they should have known better. Safari was susceptible because it opened files automatically on download. That is dangerous and the horrible experiences MicroSoft had with things like this SHOULD have served as an example to Apple for what NOT to do. It didn’t. I hope they’ve learned their lesson now!

And a Misreported Hack Success

Finally, the hack reported on ZDNet. Firstly, I’m disgusted with ZDNet for their shoddy reporting on this one. I read the ZDNet article and the implication was that the machine had been hacked remotely in 30 minutes. That would have been worrying. Thing is that is not what happened. The guy GAVE login accounts to the people who were doing the hacking! The exploit was NOT remote, it was local, and that makes the world of difference. I was disgusted when I found out from another source that that was how it had been done, ZDNet really let themselves down by leaving that vital piece of information out of their story, I for one will take everything they write from now on with a grain of salt.

What difference does it make if the exploit was remote or local? Well, on ANY OS you should only give accounts to people you trust. If you have to give accounts to un-trusted parties you need to take extra precautions to protect yourself. I very much doubt there is a single OS out there (be it a Linux, Unix or Windows variant) that does not have a local exploit, why should OS X be any different? What is important is that if you put a Mac on the internet that you are safe, that means that you should be protected from remote attacks, so far OS X seems to stand up very well to those, no doubt due to it’s excellent firewall which it inherited from it’s FreeBSD roots. In fact, another Mac was set up as a hack challenge, but without giving the attackers a login account and it lasted 38 hours before the test was cut short by University Administrators who didn’t like a machine in their network being advertised as a hacking target!

You Mean OS X is not Perfect?

So, OS X is not perfect, OS X users need to use common sense too, are you surprised? If you are then you were living in fantasy land! Linux is also not perfect, neither is Unix. There is no perfect OS! So, does that mean OS X is no better than Windows for security? Nope. Not at all. OS X has a better security model than Windows (as does Linux). The way attackers carry out remote exploits is by using a known or un-known flaw in some world-facing service on the target machine (e.g. the dreaded blaster used the RPC service to gain access to machines without the users having to do anything). The more services you have listening the more potential avenues for attack there are. You need to minimise the services you expose and you need to keep the software for those services as up-to-date as possible. On Windows there are loads of services open by default. Regardless of whether you ASKED your windows machine to run these services or not, ‘out of the box’ it will be running them, and each one is a potential entry point for nasty people into your computer. To make things worse it is actually quite tricky to turn off services on Windows, you need to be more than just an average user to have the skills to do it.

OS X and Linux by contrast have ZERO world-facing services by default! You, as a user need to turn on what you want. On OS X this is trivial to do, there is a nice simple GUI in the System Preference App to do it. The other nice thing is that the OS X firewall is tied in to the services and it’s default behavior is to block off all ports that are not needed by the services you have selected to activate. This means that, in general an attacker has FAR FAR fewer avenues of attack on an OS X or Linux machine than on a Windows machine. In fact, in general you don’t need any services open so you can keep everything closed and know that you are well protected, much better than you are on Windows unless you get technical or install third-party addons.

Finally … Some Conclusions

In Summary, here are the simple steps all Mac users should take to protect themselves:

1. Turn on your firewall, Apple provided you with it for a reason!
2. Don’t activate any services you don’t need!
3. Keep your OS up to date
4. Don’t open up any files (including apps) you get from un-trusted source

Finally, these are the reason I believe OS X is more secure than Windows

1. OS X only opens the services you ask it to
2. OS X has a better built-in firewall (the defauls are perfect for home users and power users have the power to do MUCH more, see The RIGHT way to set up a Custom Firewall on OS X and IPFW Firewall Script (Suitable for OS X))
3. The core of OS X is opensource and based on the very solid FreeBSD.
4. Apple seem to be quicker at getting out security fixes
5. OS X has a better user-model, the Unix one
6. OS X has a better file permissions model, again, the Unix one.

Well I was about half right with my predictions for yesterday’s Apple announcement. New Mac Mini’s are a reality but no super video iPod and, as I expected, no iTablet. What we did get instead was an iPod stereo. I have zero interest in the iPod stereo so I’m just going to talk about the new Mac Mini.

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Yesterday was a bitterly cold day and last night was no warmer. After the excellent Astro2 talk on Science, Religion and Dawkins only three of us were brave enough to venture out into the cold for some observing but for those of us that did it was well worth it. We had stunning views of Saturn showing the cloud bands and the Cassini division very clearly, amazing views of the Orion Nebula at ridiculously low magnification (30X) so as to get th entire thing into the same field of view and then we zoomed in on the core for a closer look. We also took in some of the open clusters in Auriga and M35 in Gemini as well as a rather un-impressive M1 (light pollution really spoils it). We then finished off with another look at Saturn because none of us could get enough of that beauty!

So, Apple have something big to launch today and apparently what ever it is will be fun. That rules out an Intel XServe and probably also an Intel PowerMac. I’ve been waiting for years for mac to do a tablet computer and considering their recent touch-screen patents it’s not entirely impossible that we will finally get an iTablet but I wouldn’t bank on it, I may find that fun but it’s probably not Steve’s idea of fun.

So, what DO I think Steve has up his sleave? Well I think it must almost certainly be media related so bearing that in mind my money is either on the TiVo like new MacMini I had expected at MacWorld in January or a new iPod dedicated to video with a large display and touch-screen controls.

Mind you I’m usually wrong so time will tell!

If you manage a server or a network nmap is one of those tools that you’d just be lost without. However, remembering the syntax for all the cool stuff it can do is a right PITA. Hence this nice simple OS X GUI to nmap is a real time and energy saver.

I can’t stress enough that NMAP is a tool that must be used responsibly. If you go around randomly scanning random people it is only a matter of time till you get into trouble, remember, it is a crime to scan machines that are not yours!

You can download NmapFE OS X from here: http://faktory.org/m/software/nmap/

It’s not particularly fancy and doesn’t have many bells and whistles but it does it’s job excellently. It gives you all your options neatly laid out in the main dialoge and then a separate window for the results of each scan (you can run many at the same time). The app even has a sense of humor, click the "script kiddie" checkbox and watch the output go all 1337!

The screenshots below show the main window and a sample output window (with the sensitive data blacked out) showing the results of a scan on one of my servers.

Des made some great points and linked to some other great blog entries on all the things that are wrong with PHP in his recent blog entry I hated php back when it was cool and I found myself agreeing with them all but I also have another gripe with PHP so I figured I may as well share mine too while the topic is hot on Planet MiNDS>.

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Yesterday was a sad day for NUI Maynooth as it was the last day that the great Brian Gormley would be counted as a member of staff of NUIM. Brian is off for a very important job in DIT and I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing him the very best.

His going away do was last night and I was glad to see so many staff and students from so many academic and service department there. Even the speeches were good and you could tell that it was more than just the standard platitudes, people were genuinely sorry to see Brian go. I think the president summed up how great a job Brian did as Director of Student Services when he informed us all that the college would be hiring two people to replace Brian. Personally I wonder will that be enough?!

Farewell Brian, Maynooth will miss you!

I generally don’t look twice at the shed-load of phising emails I get every day but one I got today caught my attention for being extra devious.

On a visual level it was nothing special, it had the Barklays logo and style etc down perfectly as is the norm, what got me about it was the content. Usually the emails pretend to be from the admins and ask you to log in to verify your details or you won’t be able to use your account. This one is different in that it tells you that some random address has been added to your account and gives you a link to un-do this change. I have a feeling this one will catch quite a few people out. As usual an inspection of the URL the link goes to gives the game away, it is not going to the Barkleys domain but to 160.red-217-125-59.staticip.rima-tde.net, which whois tells me is in Madrid. Howerver, they have again been devious because the location on that server is /.online/ibank.barclays.co.uk/ so if you lust look at the end of the URL you see barklays.co.uk which is again a devious twist. The criminals behind this one are thinking and I fear they will manage to defraud a lot of people.

Below is a screenshot of the email:

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