Control Problems

[DKIA]

Wife was having problems with a hacker who got into two of her laptops and seized control, so she made the switch and bought a Mac. Several hours ago she noticed that she only had read privileges for several folders:

directoryservices/defaultlocaldb/dbcopy
directoryservices/defaultlocal.db

Naturally, she's a bit hesitant to do anything after her two PCs were essentially rendered useless. Is there any way to change permissions other than the right-click-get info-click padlock method?

Any suggestions on what she should do next? I know she has firewalls, virus software, incoming blockers, etc. Sorry to be so vague, but she's pretty flustered right now.

Thanks for any help/input.

 

[LMeinhardt]

Try using the Disk Utility and choose the "Repair Permissions"

If there is an incorrect set of permissions, this utility will help her.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Your wife is going to have read-only privileges for many, many, many files and folders on her hard drive.

This is the way it's supposed to be -- this is UNIX.

Read/write permissions on ALL folders on the hard drive is the precise reason why Windows is so insecure, and the reason it's so easy to hijack a Windows machine.

Do NOT change permissions on read-only folders to read/write. This is a bad, bad, bad idea.

Have your wife keep her documents and personal files in her home folder (/Users/username/) and the subfolders of the home folder. She has read/write access to all of those files and folders.

Files and folders such as /System and /Library and what-not should stay read-only to her, even if she is the administrator of the computer. There is nothing she needs to do inside of those folders anyway, as they're all system files, kernel extensions and required files for OS X to operate properly.

Ditch the antivirus software. Ditch the "incoming blockers" software. Ensure you have a good firewall on your router, and ditch the software firewall. The only things those programs are going to do is alert you to a bunch of stuff that's benign and make you paranoid.

Ensure that her password for the Mac is a "strong" password (at least 8 characters, including upper- and lower-case, numerals and symbols. If you can remember the password from memory after typing it less than 20 times, you have picked a horrible password.)

These are the only things needed to ensure your Mac is close to 100% secure. Anything beyond that is overkill (and can work counter to your intentions) unless you're an IT administrator, power-user, or store Pentagon-level secret documents on your hard drive.

 

[BreatheCarolina]

EDIT: Looks like Diablo beat me to the punch. rofl. anyway, what Diablo said x2


Sounds like your wife was dealing with a trojan or worm with her two previous laptops. Not an uncommon occurrence unfortunately. And also not the product of a direct hacker attack either, although the outcome is pretty much the same.

Many on this forum (including myself) will be quick to point out that the chances of any Mac user (using Mac OS X, no guarantee about Windows here) getting viruses, malware, or any other kind of malacious software is extremely rare and the chances of being the direct target of an actual hack attempt even more so. As long as you are using a firewall (the one built into Mac OS X is great) and actively using good security practices (i.e. not opening email attachments unless your sure about the contents, not downloading things from questionable websites, etc...) you will be more than safe. If your feeling really paranoid than a decent anti-virus program should max out your security (I recommend the free program ClamXav).

Disk Utility will repair permissions back to their default state. So if their default state is read-only than that's what it will be after you repair the permissions. Its not uncommon for any user (even one with an administrator account) to have read-only permissions for some things. Its not something that you should really worry about and certainly isn't a sure sign of malicious software.

Unless your wife has State Secrets on her laptops or direct access to billions of dollars there is absolutely no reason for a hacker to waste their time and resources hacking her laptops (or anybody else's for that matter). Not to trivialize your issues but that's the black and white of it.


EDIT: Link to the Virus Sticky on these forums. More info there (basically a rehash of everything Diablo and myself said)

 

[ex2bot]

Following up on ElDiablo's post, your wife may want to drag both her home folder and Application folder to the Dock. Click on Finder, click the "Go" menu, click "Home", and drag the little Home folder icon in the top middle of the window to the Dock. Double-click the "Macintosh HD" folder and drag the Applications folder to the Dock.

This is a quick shortcut to two important folders. I also have my "Documents" folder on my Dock.