santa VS CIS-for-macOS-Catalina-CP

For anyone wondering: https://github.com/google/santa

Have you looked at SANTA?

Not directly relevant but interesting...

https://github.com/google/santa

This is a product developed by Google that has at least been utilized internally to some extent. It's not perfect, but my previous company used it and it does prevent unexpected unknown code from running in the background.

What it does not do is prevent someone from intentionally downloading and executing a library unless the upvoter actually comes to some demand that you do so. I found that it quickly became a bit of a "alert fatigue" where you approve things your coworkers send you so they can get back to work without properly vetting.

If you really want to get draconian with your controls/logging have a look into https://github.com/google/santa

Is your company open to adopting open source tooling? There is a tool called Santa that could be used to block binaries from executing.

you may like https://github.com/google/santa

> Infostealers for Mac are a thing (Uber is a mac heavy shop I hear)

Block unknown executables on company machines. Google developed Santa to protect themselves: https://github.com/google/santa

> and that's all it takes to steal cookies and tokens post-mfa,

Make post-MFA cookies and tokens short-lived. Require MFA re-authentication at least daily.

> or why even bother with that, if you're running code just make it a reverse shell.

All outbound connections should be strictly monitored, especially from production servers, which should have no ability to make outbound connections. With modern dependency management, that's harder for build servers, but still doable.

https://github.com/google/santa for anyone curious

You can get most of the way to hardening to CIS level 1 picking more up-to-date fork of these https://github.com/jamf/CIS-for-macOS-Catalina-CP.

FWIW, CIS level 1 will mean people get locked out of their machines very frequently. Complex 15 character passwords with 3 retries from memory. So you need a half-decent MDM to unlock quickly. There is no half-decent MDM out there. Only shit ones but workable like Jamf.

Also you the username does't get auto-populated on login so the typo can be in username and user assumes it is with password. Very fast way to get lock outs.

To pass a full security review you might want to play with Google Santa. But that is intense.