OS X Hardening: Securing a Large Global Mac Fleet

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Greg Castle, Security Engineer, Google Inc.

Abstract:

OS X security is evolving: defenses are improving with each OS release but the days of “Macs don’t get malware” are gone. Recent attacks against the Java Web plugin have kindled a lot of interest in hardening and managing Macs. So how does Google go about defending a large global Mac fleet? Greg will discuss various hardening tweaks and a range of OS X defensive technologies including XProtect, Gatekeeper, Filevault 2, sandboxing, auditd, and mitigations for Java and Flash vulns.

A former pentester, incident responder, and forensic analyst, Greg Castle has been responsible for the security of Google’s OS X fleet for a couple of years, working closely with the Google MacOps team to harden and protect Google’s global Mac fleet. He is now working in Google’s incident response team on the GRR Rapid Response project: Google’s open source incident response framework.

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