It is in every Mac user’s best interest to keep their computer running smooth at all times. There are plenty of hurdles to maintaining system health and keeping malware away, though. As opposed to the way it was back in the day, Mac machines are now being heavily targeted by browser hijackers, adware, phishing attacks, and ransomware. The new MacBooster 6 application efficiently detects and removes all of these threats, plus it goes equipped with a bevy of Mac optimization features.

The invulnerability of macOS in the face of various cyber threats has become somewhat of a misperception over the past few years. The emergence of Mac ransomware and the rise of adware targeting this operating system are serious challenges requiring an all-new protection paradigm. Under the circumstances, tools like MacBooster come in handy as they stand sentinel to safeguard Macs against known and uncatalogued malware.

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Such important vectors of examining arbitrary code’s activity on Mac OS X as process analysis and network analysis are the subjects Sarah Edwards explicates here. In the context of the former, the expert dwells on instruments called Dtrace, including execsnoop and newproc.d; fs_usage; procxp; and the Activity Monitor. As far as network analysis is concerned, popular tools like CocoaPacketAnalyzer, Wireshark, Tcpdump and lsock get scrutinized and demonstrated via real-world examples.

Forensic analyst Sarah Edwards now turns the focus of her presentation to the ins and outs of file analysis on Mac OS X. Within the framework of this nontrivial activity, really verbose tools such as Dtrace, fs_usage and fseventer are looked into, with some examples of the returned metadata and other attributes being provided along the way. Generally, this part is covering the methods for analyzing arbitrary Mac files and the types of information that can be retrieved as a result of this workflow.

The topics covered by Sarah Edwards in this sub-section of her presentation are related to the various aspects of performing dynamic analysis of Mac applications, including malicious ones. In particular, the following processes are looked into: virtualization - that is, running code in a virtual machine; and application tracing, which is intended to return data on app execution, file system events, etc. Also, the tools applicable for dynamic analysis are listed here and demonstrated in action.