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Security concerns

F

freshstart14

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 7, 2014
3
0
Hi everyone,

I'm rather new to Macs as a whole despite owning a Macbook pro for the past 3 years.

I have a MacBook Pro that I've been using for my work but recently, my partnership's soured and we've parted ways. I kinda made the mistake of leaving my Mac in the office while I went out to get some things done. I told my ex-partners that they could delete the mails in Entourage to make sure I wasn't taking away business from them but that's all they had access to as the Mac was mine.

What basically happened was that when I came back a few hours later, they told me they had to re-build the database to see what I've deleted. They tried transferring data out of Entourage but were seemingly unsuccessful.

So, now that that's all been done and said, I'm kind of suspicious of what else they might have done on my Mac while I was away. I know they've always been keen on some other stuff on my database, how can I tell if my Mac's been hacked and they've gone through all my stuff and made duplicates? Is this even legal?
 
Legal or illegal, no idea, but you gave him access to the machine, you probably won't have much of a ground to stand on if/when you decide to do something about it but I can't say much more about this, I have no idea what's your company's policy on stuff like that.

Depending on how much stuff you have on the Mac, few hours is enough to copy everything, how important are these files? What would happen if they got into the wrong hands?

Also check activity monitor and look for anything strange, since you left him alone for hours, he could have installed something malicious, like a keylogger.
 
Thanks for the reply guys.

Well, there aren't any company policies in place. There were just the 4 of us friends who came together to start a small recruiting business. To save costs, we just used our own laptops, brought it with us and worked from home or from the office, or, on a nice enough day, the cafe or park.

I'm a total newbie when it comes to tech stuff.

Is there anyway, logs or any program that I could run to find out what's been done to my mac while I was away, if data has been copied or if there's been malware or spyware installed? I reckon the safest thing to do is just to do a complete reset to factory settings or something but I don't want to do that since I've lost my original copies of MS Office with the serial numbers.......my bad
 
I'd say back up your data, and do a clean install. That will give you peace of mind that there's no malware.
 
Yeah, I guess that would be the best thing to do in order to put my mind at ease.
 
Also as a take away, don't be so trusting, especially when a partnership is souring. I'm not saying he did anything but rather just so you can sleep at night. :)
 
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