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How secure is my MBA?

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macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 16, 2013
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I just bought a MBA. In the past, with my iMac, I never had it require a password to turn on or come out of sleep. But now that I have a laptop that I will be taking out of the home, I am reconsidering that.

I'm just curious how secure OS X is? Can someone relatively easily get past the security or is it pretty secure?
 
Even with a password it is trivial to reset that password and get into your system. See this.

If you are concerned at all about securing your MBA, you will want to turn on Filevault flu disk encryption. If you have Filevault turned on and someone steals your MBA, they are not going to be able to access your data.
 
Wow, that's crazy. I wonder how many people think their stuff is safe because they have a password set.
 
Even with a firmware password set on your MBA, someone can remove the data drive from your MBA and read the data off with an external adapter or by putting it in another computer.

FileVault2 eliminates this possibility as well. In short, if you want your data secured use FileVault2 to encrypt the drive. Make sure to set a good password. If they can guess your password then an attacker can still get your data.
 
mfram said:
Even with a firmware password set on your MBA, someone can remove the data drive from your MBA and read the data off with an external adapter or by putting it in another computer.

FileVault2 eliminates this possibility as well. In short, if you want your data secured use FileVault2 to encrypt the drive. Make sure to set a good password. If they can guess your password then an attacker can still get your data.
Click to expand...

FileVault 2 alone isn't enough, set an EFI password to lock down the EFI as well to prevent booting from secondary devices, Recovery, single user mode or even TDM.
 
What mfram said re: strong password. Person with right tools and skills will be able to crack the passcode "offline".
 
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