#REASON FOR MAC OS X HOW TO#

I will debunk some widely held myths about how to use and administrate Macs safely, and I will explain how you can ensure those in your organization are not the next unfortunate Mac users to begin dangerously searching the internet for a solution to a problem they barely knew they had. In this post, I will share with you what I have told those users and many others about macOS security.

#REASON FOR MAC OS X WINDOWS#

Often, IT teams trained and tasked with ironing out problems with Windows devices are equally uncertain. All had no idea how to remove the infection, or verify that the Mac was indeed healthy after they had tried. Some said that not having to run AV products was precisely the reason why they chose a Mac and ditched their previous Windows machine. Most thought that they didnвЂ™t need to take any special security precautions when using a Mac. The users of these Macs are more often than not surprised to learn that their Mac got a dose of some nasty adware or malware.ДЇew ever know how the malware got on their device. Most of my work nowadays revolves around identifying, tracking, and understanding Mac malware in the enterprise, and in the course of my work I inevitably come across more than my fair share of infected Macs. IвЂ™m also a Mac security researcher and having a catalogue of older versions of macOS is part of my arsenal of tools when it comes to understanding how to keep Macs and Mac users safe. Yep, IвЂ™m an Apple nerd, a Mac geek, a macOS enthusiast, and IвЂ™ve spent over a decade now learning how Macs and macOS work.

In fact, give me a few minutes and I could spin you up an instance of any version of macOS from 10.5.8 Leopard (circa 2008!) right through to the latest beta of macOS 12 Monterey. I also run macOS on a number of virtual machines for research purposes. Aside from the two provided by my employer, I have five working Macs of my own, ranging from 2009 to 2021. You can find this by using this command (which you can copy/paste into terminal): grep 'Previous shutdown cause' /var/log/system.Macs are great, arenвЂ™t they? I have many. On older systems, you should be able to find the text 'Previous shutdown cause' in your system log. For example, my last shutdown cause was '-128' which, unfortunately, is 'unknown'. To find the meaning of that number, you can use this site: Of course, expand the time if your restart happened more than 24 hours in the past.ДЄfter a while, you should see a message which contains a number indicating a reason. On newer macOS (macOS 10.12 and later) with the unified logging system, the processing of the text files doesn't show the whole story, so use the log show command below: log show -predicate 'eventMessage contains 'Previous shutdown cause'' -last 24h Terminal can be found in the Utilities folder which is found in the Applications folder. I know Console provides details, but I rarely see it as more than a GUI to access the logs. I use Terminal a lot, so my answer will include commands used in that application.

#REASON FOR MAC OS X UPDATE#

So how can I check why it just 'restarted'? I want to know if my crashing problem came back after such a long time of stability, if asking Chrome to update somehow allowed the other pending upgrades to restart the OS, or if it was some other reason. The App Store is telling me that I still need to restart to complete updates. When I check when the last reboot was using uptime or System Information it tells me 32 days. I verified that it had restarted by switching to the Terminal app which showed the Restored text with a timestamp from about a minute ago. I'm using the scare quotes because I don't think it was rebooting from scratch since I didn't see the Apple logo with progress bar, which can be a little slow on my system. When I turned back to the computer it seemed to be 'restarting'. I clicked on the update button and wandered off to do something before it responded in any way. Google Chrome was getting slow and had been displaying the green update arrow for a day or two.

I installed some OS updates in the past couple of days but chose not to restart yet. My Mac does sometimes crash and restart but hasn't done so for a couple of months. My Mac just 'restarted' while I was looking away and I'd like to know if it was a crash or a postponed restart due to an update.

Reason for mac os x