In Love---with OS X

I remember messing around with mac when OS X came out. I was in my high school's Mac Lab almost everyday tinkering with the terminal and stuff I never thought I'd use a Mac to do pen testing. The weird thing though is that in a lot of movies I notice that the IT ppl use Macs or mac interfaces. Even in the show "The Real Hustle" it looks like they use Macs during their bits. So wednesday I bought a PowerbookG4 867MHz 768RAM from craigslist that was dirt cheap. The details about the guy obtaining the laptop were sketchy, but I didn't care I just wanted a laptop. I've been using windows and *nix for ever and have always had a bias against Macs, but I have to admit...I am impressed. I've got my IRC client, wikipedia and dictionary widgets installed. NmapFE, and I'm downloading FINK and Xcode as I type to be able to get more and newer version of software. Things are not bad at all. (not yet?) Does anyone else do pen testing on a Mac? Any reccomended tools or sites? I'm loving how awesome the interface is but at the same time having being able to pull up that terminal and have a bash shell waiting for my commands...it's effing sweet, oh and Laptops are great too! I can finally start making some money this summer and get some Official Pen Testing experience.

If you bought a laptop from someone who as you nicely put it, isn't in the better business bureau, FIRST thing I'd say, is format the thing and reinstall the OS. If they put key loggers or a root kit in there isn't much point in downloading tools they'd probably install anyway right?

Anyway, to answer your question; Now that Mac OS is based on BSD, a lot of tools from BSD and Linux will work on it, so check into that. I'd recommend hydra, Hping, and IPSorcery if you can find it.

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If you bought a laptop from someone who as you nicely put it, isn't in the better business bureau, FIRST thing I'd say, is format the thing and reinstal

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Best advice you have ever had............... like the kiddie pr0n? that is on there?

Hey, I am cautious about stuff from sources I know:rolleyes:

You *did* do a format and reinstall, right?

I'm on an Intel Mac at work, and it reaffirms to me the basic mundanity of the universe. It's making about the same issues-per-hour my old XP box at home is. Ever had the Terminal app lock up? The system won't restart, since it can't stop the process. Force quit doesn't work (although it "helpfully" removes it from the list even though it's not really zapped) and forget using Sudo and the command line... because Terminal's broken. :P

Its so true, mac OS is just as bad as windows in terms of number of errors. However, they are usually not so deadly, just irritating.

I think so too Aardpsymon - Macs have their share of problems but most of them are locally exploitable not remotely like windows. This makes it a more secure OS.

All OSs have defects, design flaws, and very very stupid usability issues.
I think the big difference between Windows and OS X is that on Windows when you hit up against a bug you kinda shrug your shoulders, sigh, and think to yourself, oh well thats Windows for you.
With OS X when you hit a bug, you sit dumb founded looking for ways to make it work, swearing at the screen and trying to convince the OS by way of clever dialog that it should start working again for you.

I know that im like this. I know that OS X has many many issues and it really annoys me when i get stuck on one of them. But when im using Windows i expect to get screwed over by bugs, so in some ways i dont stress out about it as much.

Never had the terminal lock up on me. In fact I usually keep one open all the time. I kill frozen apps that way sometimes if force quit doesn't work. I have also been able to gracefully reboot when I couldn't do so from the finder. That is a hard thing to get used to after being in slackware for so long... rebooting.

I love Mac OS instead of Windows because it’s more secure (I’ve never gotten a virus or malware). More importantly, the operating system is tuned to work with specific hardware that is all assembled and tested by Apple to ensure maximum performance.