santa VS macos_security

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

For starters there's an entire NIST project for macOS Security Compliance - https://github.com/usnistgov/macos_security this will make your life a million times easier to meet a lot of the technical controls required for compliance. Nothing like this really exists for Windows or Linux(closest is Compliance As Code https://github.com/ComplianceAsCode/content)

https://github.com/usnistgov/macos_security - for macOS this would help.

I’d highly recommend checking out the usnistgov/macos_security on GitHub. You can generate a benchmark and then feed the output into extension attributes to trigger policies on.

Study about cybersecurity, or how to harden a macOS fleet against published security frameworks.

Weigh the pros and cons about having your end-users be standard users or admins on their Macs. If they are already admins (probably), consider the political blowback if you take away their admin rights and flexibility and autonomy they've become used to. Conversely, consider the security posture of your organization. If it has to adhere to some well-known guides (like 800-171 o 800-53r5), then you may not be able to allow end-users to be admins. Take a look at the macOS Security Compliance Project.

NIST Compliance Benchmarks: github.com/usnistgov/macos_security

Like OP, I'm trying to disable both bonjour and netbios. I'm using this script: https://github.com/usnistgov/macos_security/blob/main/includes/enablePF-mscp.sh