Take Control of Securing Your Mac

by Glenn Fleishman

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

177 pages, ebook

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

I started writing as a child and never stopped. I’ve always been interested in what makes things tick and how to explain that. That led to a career as a technology journalist and how-to article and book author. I’ve written dozens of books over my career in some combination of the two.

In the 2010s, I started publish a series of book that combined printing and type history and technology in a variety of ways. These titles include Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It, a collection of essays and reporting; London Kerning, a look at two magnificent London printing collections and the city’s typographical history; Six Centuries of Type & Printing; and How Comics Were Made, a heavily visual history of the production and reproduction of newspaper comics from the 1890s to the present.

I live in Seattle, Washington, with my family, and drink very little coffee.