Hands-On Tech 205 Transcript

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0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. Let's take a look at the age-old-at-this-time question about whether we need to be using malware protection on our Macs. Stay tuned.

Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech. I am Mikah Sargent and today we've got a question from Ron, who writes in to say this you gave me some great advice a few weeks ago regarding my about to be purchased Mac Mini. I now have that Mac Mini and am happily using it, thanks in no small part to you, Ron. Very glad to hear that. I hope you're still loving it even now after you sent in this question. You say a question just came up. Should I get a malware protection program?

I know that Macs are not targeted as much as Windows computers. I also know that Leo is skeptical about these on the Windows platform. He points out that our use of the computer is the chief way that problems occur. Do you think the same applies to the Mac? If you think a malware program is a good idea, which one? So for those of you who are following along at home, in the notes you'll notice that I said I've got, oh, I'll have.

You know a lot to say about this. First and foremost, yes, what Leo has said in the past. What our wonderful Steve Gibson has said as well, and what I also feel is the case, is that, first and foremost, before anything else, your behavior on your machine is the chief way to keep yourself from interacting with malware. Do you regularly download programs from random places? Do you go and open email that has strange attachments and you're downloading PDFs that may have weird links in them that you click on? Is there more than just you using the machine? Maybe you'll have somebody who doesn't have that same sort of security knowledge as you. All of those things play into whether you need to kind of take more steps to protect yourself. Protect yourself Due to the nature of the work that I do, I have, at different times, needed to use some stuff on my Mac that maybe isn't you know, direct from the Mac App Store, that isn't sort of blessed by Apple, that isn't this or isn't that, and I do a lot of play in the terminal and I use different packages, open source packages that are downloaded.

I mean, there are all of these different reasons why you may have some concerns. One good thing to understand is that, on top of just the basic functionality and the basic knowledge of the fact that the Mac is targeted less because there are fewer Macs in sort of the business environment and there are fewer kind of bits of malware written specifically for the Mac. All of that comes together to make it so that it's safe. But aside from that, it is important to understand that Apple does regularly add in protections for the system. macOS by default is a very sandboxed environment where individual apps don't gain access to lots of other parts of the system and have to jump through lots of hoops in order to be able to do so. And if you don't disable system integrity prevention or system integrity protection, then you and it's hard to do that. So chances are you have not. You have a lot of extra protections in place and, as the delightful and ever knowledgeable ScooterX has reminded us, there's also XProtect, which is kind of a built-in tool that helps to provide for kind of in the background checking to make sure that things are working as they should and that you don't have concerns there. And Apple regularly updates XProtect and recently, as of February 26th, had an update for it. The thing is, windows also has tools like XProtect that you download and that keep the system kind of scanned, and the idea with those programs is typically, if the company becomes aware of a kind of wide ranging or quickly spreading bit of malware, then something like those tools can help to remove those bad actors in your machine, right. But let's talk about what we would do if you know. We feel like we're being protected, we feel like we're doing the right thing, we feel like we're being careful about what we download. But maybe one time you need to download something and you're unsure, or maybe you just want to have that sort of knowledge, that piece right in the back of your mind.

I take my advice from a friend of the show show and former MacBreak Weekly panelist, Rene Ritchie, who keyed me in, clued me in to the method that he uses whenever it comes to his Macs and I say Macs as in multiple Mac PCs. So Because I have eero routers and because I pay for the eero subscription service that adds some extra features to the routing environment, I have a subscription that comes with that to a program that I use and recommend called Malwarebytes, and Malwarebytes, which we'll include a link to in the show notes, is a malware removal and protection program. Malwarebytes has been around for a long time, definitely on the Mac has been known to be a tool that can be used to help you keep track of your machine or keep your machine safe and secure. And here is what Renee Ritchie had to say, and this is the sort of advice that I follow.

There's one thing about Malwarebytes which is that it is a resource hungry program. It runs in the background to kind of keep an eye on the system, to go, okay, is anything being installed or downloaded? That might be an issue, and then warn you about it, tell you about it if that's the case, but because of that it kind of slows things down. So what Rene says that he does is for most of the time he does not have malware bytes installed on his machine. Most of the time he does not have Malwarebytes installed on his machine. And about once a month, once every two months maybe once, when he feels like something might have been weird that he downloaded or installed or something's going kind of strange on the machine or he just got that tickle in the back of his head like, ooh, something's kind of odd here, he will download his paid for license of Malwarebytes and will run a scan on the machine, maybe keep it for a couple of days running, see that everything's fine and then uninstall it again, and I have taken that method for myself, the Rene Ritchie method of using Malwarebytes. I mean I, by having an eero subscription, have it as a subscription that I can use, and so it didn't cost me extra to do that. But I have found that it does give me a little bit of peace of mind to know that that's running in the background.

There are some other means of protecting your device, but I have found a lot of them to be a little bit um, a little bit involved and a little bit kind of um, what's the word I'm looking for? Uh, they interrupt your sort of access to your machine. Um, I want to note too ScooterX has said something really interesting in the chat. Malwarebytes has found and removed some terrible things on some of my customers' Macs. These customers seem to click on every ad and visit some very sketchy websites based on their browser history. So, again, if you are following those behaviors, that's where this might come into play. Ron, if you don't follow those behaviors, you may never need to use something like this.

But the thing that I was alluding to when I was talking about being a little bit more interrupty is a tool called Knock Knock from Objective-C. I didn't link this in the original show notes, but I'm popping it into the Discord now and that's at objective-corg, and Knock Knock looks to see what stuff what login items, what scripts, what different things are persistently installed on your machine, and then it gives you the ability to say no, I don't want that installed, or no, I don't want that to be able to load on my machine. Installed or no, I don't want that to be able to load on my machine. And so it's a little bit more information. But I found this to be a power user tool and it can quickly become a little bit overwhelming for folks who maybe take those prompts and those alerts as saying, oh my goodness, there's something absolutely wrong with this device and everything's wrong and everything's bad. So if you feel like you would have that anxiety, you don't necessarily know what each of these prompts might mean.

I don't fully recommend Knock Knock as something that you would use, but it is available, it is there, and if you, ron, are someone with a little bit more knowledge about the system and what these different prompts might mean, then maybe this is something that could give you even more peace of mind. But ultimately I think that it is true, and I fully hold that it is true, that your behavior is the most important aspect of your protection, online and, I guess, offline as well. And that applies to not just the Mac but also on Windows. And there are plenty of people on Windows who, through their behaviors, are able to avoid any of these issues and then occasionally have microsoft, you know, provide uh, a bit of of system scanning to check and make sure everything's good to go and that there's nothing on the machine that is, um, you know, nefarious. So a quick summary. So, ron, for you everything's probably going to be okay, but I also understand wanting the peace of mind. That's where I recommend Malwarebytes. And then, if you want to get even more kind of a guard standing at the front door and regularly announcing to you when someone's walking up, then Knock, knock might be a tool that you can use. It's open source and available for free from Objective-C.

All right, let's take a little tiny moment here to mention Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. That's where you can go to become a member of our club. It's $7 a month, but we've got a two-week free trial so you can see if the club is for you. When you join the club you gain access to a bunch of great stuff. You gain access to all of our shows, all of our content, ad-free. You gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twit events get published there. And access to the members-only Discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit. So be sure to head to twit.tv/clubtwit to check it out and get that two-week free trial. Would love to see you in the Discord, love to see you hanging out and seeing what we have to offer.

All right, before we go, I do want to read some follow-up that came in from Glenn. Glenn had written in to ask about what he needed to do to stop Apple devices from listening for S-I-R-I because, moving around in his space, he was finding that the Apple virtual assistant or digital assistant was being regularly summoned and Glenn found it annoying. So I provided some advice on what to do. But I wanted to bring up this follow-up because I think it often provides insights into where somebody might be missing something. So Glenn says I just listened to your response about disabling Siri, thank you. I had the laptop disabled, but not the HomePods, so thanks. I used to have an Amazon device in the office. Its favorite surprise to say was uh-huh, it now resides in another room. So, Glenn, I'm glad that that worked out for you.

Yes, you can disable the Apple Virtual Assistant across devices. It is not just your iPhone or your Mac, but also your HomePods. You can turn off listening for the wake word as well. With that, we have reached the end of this episode of Hands-on Tech. I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to write in with your questions. Just a reminder that's H-O-T@twit.tv to have your question answered on this show. I'll see you again next week for another episode. Thanks for being here and goodbye.