Macs come with antivirus and other built-in security features make attacking a Mac particularly challenging. Such products have their advantages and you may choose to install one for more peace of mind, but we don’t view them as essential for the Mac.įor one thing, there are measures put in place by Apple at the operating system level that should protect Mac users from the worst malware threats. Mac malware does pose a risk that users should be aware of, but it doesn’t follow that Macs absolutely must be equipped with antivirus software. Updated December 2023 to include details of new security features in macOS Sonoma and the latest news about the state of Mac malware. “If you took Mac security techniques and applied them to the iOS ecosystem, with all those devices, all that value,” he said, “it would get run over to a degree dramatically worse than is already happening on the Mac.” The Mac is not meeting that bar today.”įederighi noted that Mac users don’t download as much software as iOS users, and argued that if iOS was as open to third-party downloads there would be a real problem for that platform. iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. When the judge asked about the fact that Mac users can purchase and download software from various places on the Mac, rather than being limited to the Mac App Store, Federighi said: “Yeah, it’s certainly how we’ve done it on the Mac and it’s regularly exploited on the Mac. He even admitted that members of his family had got malware on their Macs. He said, “we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable,” Federighi revealed that 130 different cases had been documented since May 2020, and that one of these had affected more than 300,000 Macs. Click Save and the new password is applied to the account.Even Apple software boss Craig Federighi has acknowledged (back in May 2021) that Mac malware is a problem… although it’s worth bearing in mind that at the time he was trying to make the case for iOS’s very different approach to security. Enter and verify a new passwords in the appropriate fields and, if you like, enter a password hint. Select the volume that contains the account you want to reset and choose the user name that needs its password reset. In OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, OS X Yosemite and OS X El Capitan, a Reset Password window will appear that will list all the bootable volumes attached to your Mac. Choose to 'Restart' the Mac and when the Mac boots up, use the newly reset password to login to the computer. Enter a new password, confirm the new password, set (if you like) a password hint and then click on 'Next' to set the new password for the account in question.

Choose the user account or admin account you want to reset the password for. In macOS Sierra and macOS High Sierra, an Reset Password assistant will launch. From the Utilities menu, choose Terminal to open it. To reset a login password in OS X Mountain Lion or later, restart the Mac and hold down Command-R to boot into the Recovery HD partition. In the old days you could reset a login password via a Mac's OS X installer disc. General Security Terminal Tips & Tricks Troubleshooting

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