Apple Mac OS is one of the stable and secure operating system available today. You have plenty of built-in security options to keep your privacy and data secured. Your computer security matters a lot, when you and your family members use it in your every day routine for checking and sending emails, surfing the internet, watching movies and other documents, spreadsheet related works. Managing individual accounts for your family is a good practice and Mac OS lets you do that with its best account management feature.
No need to have a fear about Personal Data being accessed by others or any other privacy intrusions and important data being deleted. Apple has improved the multiple accounts management feature in OS X Mountain Lion. After the recent Mountain Lion update, you can now integrate Facebook, Twitter, iMessage and Notes with your Mac. Guest User Account is one intelligent feature that lets you easily manage any Guest Logins with auto deleting of their surfing and other temporary files once they are done with the internet access in your computer.
Apparently the installer needs to peek at Mac server to see if it knows the Mac is enrolled in a management scheme and update, or it may be confused by mac T2 chip. Skip it until you can click 'Continue without an internet connection' and complete setting up the admin account and other features as prefered. This copy of the Install OS X. How to set up and manage user accounts on a Mac: Set Parental Controls To enable Parental Controls for a user, click on that user in the lefthand window of Users & Groups and click the checkbox.
You dont have to manually delete or customize the login to prevent access to your private files and others users data. By default it is well protected and you can let anyone access your computer without any thoughts of security issues.
![Account Account](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126526443/898406603.png)
Guest user accounts let others to use your Mac Temporarily. It will give a very limited access towards the user and you can have the complete control over the guest user account on your Mac. Even if you are not there and someone is using your Mac, they can log in only through Guest account, not on yours. By default guest user account will give access towards only the Internet. The user who log in through guest account cannot access any applications or data installed in your system and once they log out of that account all their personal logs will be deleted automatically. Let me highlight few points that shows how to create, manage and disable guest user account.
By default guest account will be automatically enabled, if it is disabled in your Mac follow these steps to enable it. Go to System preferences and in the “System” category you will find Users & Groups. Click that to see and manage all the user accounts on your Mac. To make changes first you need to click the lock at the left bottom of the screen and enter your password. Once you did that, click the Guest User option on the left panel and you will get an option as shown in the screenshot. Click Allow guests to log in to this computer option on the window. This will enable the guest account on your Mac.
As I said before, by default guest account will give access only towards the safari to use Internet. If you want to access towards some of the applications on your Mac also on some of your data, you can do that in Parental Controls. In Mac, parental controls is an effective system management application, which helps you to take control over all the functions on your Mac. You can manage applications, Internet usage, mails, games and game center access in your guest account easily through parental controls. You can refer to this tutorial to know about parental controls. Kodak easyshare software for mac sierra.
If you feel guest account on your Mac is annoying and want to disable that completely, you can do that from the same Users & Groups option in the System preferences. Once you open the Users & Groups window, you need to unlock the options by clicking the lock icon at the left bottom of the window. One you did that, click Guest User option on the left panel of the window. Then remove the check mark from “Allow Guests to log in to this Computer“. This will automatically disable the guest account from your Mac and you will not see the Guest User option in the log in screen. Don’t forget to lock the changes, by clicking the lock icon before closing the window.
These are the steps to Enable, Manage and disable guest account on your Mac OS X. Try this on your Mac and share your experience with us in the comments. Do let us know if you have any doubts or questions regarding this article in the comment box. Thanks for reading. Have a great day.
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␡- User Accounts and Access Control
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This chapter is from the book Mac OS X Security
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
User Accounts and Access Control
One of the driving principles of information security is the idea of Least Privilege. Least Privilege is the concept that an entity should be given only the fewest possible rights to perform its required activity and no more. For instance, if a user only needs to surf the Internet, he does not need the capability to change the system's IP address or add new users. By giving a user more access than he requires, you are opening the door to, at the very least, system instability and possibly security compromises. https://beautygenerous830.weebly.com/canon-lide-110-driver-for-mac-high-sierra.html. Unfortunately, most modern operating systems were not designed from the ground up to adhere to Least Privilege. Usability and extensibility won the day. Locking down users to a small subset of commands is a difficult job. Thinking about what your users need to accomplish and being diligent with systems configuration will drive up the security of your systems.
When Mac OS X is first installed on a host, a user is created with administrator privileges. This user has a great deal of control of the workstation, either directly through the various System Preferences panes or through other mechanisms such as sudo. Mac OS X attempts to limit the direct access this administrative user has by requiring an administrative password be supplied when an especially sensitive activity is performed. For example, when installing a third-party application that needs to modify your network stack, Mac OS X will launch an authentication screen to verify the activity. When launching commands through the Terminal program sudo, you are prompted for a password as well.
However, there are still a great number of activities that an admin user can perform that you may not want to allow everyone to do. Mac OS X comes with a robust user creation utility that allows you to have a reasonable amount of control over what users can and cannot do. If someone other than yourself will use your host, for example, a coworker or relative, it is advisable to create a user account specifically for that person which grants only the access they require.
Role Accounts
A role account is an account that multiple people use to gain access to a host. Role accounts are common in an office environment where a group of individuals require the same type of access. For example, everyone in finance may use the finance account to connect to an ftp server. Although this simplifies account management, it makes tracking illicit use very difficult. Every person accessing a system should have his or her own unique account. This provides a more complete audit trail for you to examine when something bad happens to the machine.
The Users tab in the Accounts System Preferences pane controls all user accounts on the system. Adding a new user is as simple as clicking New User and filling in all the required fields (see Figure 3.8). The Name field is what is commonly known in the UNIX world as the GECOS field. This should contain the user's full name and any relevant contact information. The Short Name field corresponds to the UNIX username. When filling in the password field, be sure to use a strong password. A strong password is not guessable and should contain a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters. Be sure the user changes her password when she first logs on to the host.
Holdem Manager For Mac Os X
Figure 3.8 Adding a new user.
Leave the Password Hint field blank. As mentioned before this will be of great help to an attacker and should be disabled for the login screen. If need be, give the user administration privileges, but only do so if absolutely required. Also, you can allow the user to log in from a Windows host via SMB. This enables SMB access for the entire host and grants that user access to his or her files on the system. Again, only grant this access if it is required for your network. For more information on SMB and other network services, see Chapter 6, 'Internet Services.'
After the user has been added to the system you can further limit his access by clicking Capabilities in the Accounts pane. This allows for fine-grained control over what the user can and cannot do on the host. You can control whether the user can modify system settings, burn CDs, or even launch certain programs. Note that the Capabilities button is not available if the new user has administrator privileges. There is an option to enable the Simple Finder for the user. Simple Finder allows you to limit what applications a user can see. By selecting applications in the Applications list view, Simple Finder will only display the allowed applications. Also, Simple Finder can only open documents containing the users Documents folder in their Home. The Simple Finder cannot open ordinary folders.
The underlying mechanism that controls user accounts is not the standard UNIX /etc/password architecture. NetInfo is a distributed user management system that is employed by Mac OS X for authentication and authorization issues. When making changes to a user, you are really making the changes to the NetInfo database. For more information on NetInfo see NetInfo in Chapter 10, 'Directory Services.' The UNIX /etc/password construct is used by Mac OS X only in the event of booting to single user mode.
Limiting Access Is Hard to Do
Restricting access to a subset of programs is not always bulletproof. Remember Bruce's mischievous coworkers who were constantly breaking into each other's workstations? Well, they were also finding ways to break through various restrictions on their user accounts imposed on them based on Least Privilege. Through the sudo tool they were granted rights to the UNIX editor vi so they could edit various sensitive system files when needed. However, vi could be used to view files they were not supposed to view. It was also able to launch other programs from within itself. So using the higher privilege level of the vi process, they could run other programs which were not explicitly allowed to them under sudo.
The problem was due to transitivity of trust from sudo to vi to other external programs. By giving them explicit rights to use vi, sudo was actually giving them rights to all the programs on the host. Luckily, rather than be malicious about the excess trust, they used it as a tool to learn more about locking down user accounts. One of them would modify sudo to further limit access while still allowing everyone to do their jobs and the rest of them would try to break out of the little 'jail' that was created. It taught them the good and bad about Least Privilege and trying to enforce it.
Remember, just because a user does not have explicit access to a program through his account does not mean he will not find a way to access it.
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