With the ever-growing population of Macs in enterprise and education
environments, proper management of them is now a necessity. This
session will focus on OS X security, beginning with the security and
management risks of granting users local administrator rights, and how
to properly deal with revoking those rights. Users with local
administrator rights are a security risk to entire organizations, and
also pose threats to their own machines due to the ability to
manipulate any setting.
With the default settings of a standard account, users will frequently
hit barriers requiring administrator authorization, for everything
from adding printers to changing the time zone. By moving to a managed
environment, controlling access through security authorization, and
properly evaluating software, users will no longer have a need for
administrator rights, and systems administrators will no longer be
burdened by users making core system changes.
This session will also feature other security features of OS X, such
as Xprotect, Gatekeeper, and Firmware passwords.
Suggested prerequisites: Command Line 101
Samuel Keeley has been the Systems Director for United States Senator
Mark Kirk since 2010, managing a large fleet of Macs in a secure
enterprise environment. He can frequently be found in ##osx-server on
Freenode, or on Twitter @keeleysam.