my friends were scammed

None of that would help if they voluntarily give access to the computer. All those precautions would be bypassed if they give some unknown person such access. But I agree with all your suggested precautions other than:

1. FileVault is only necessary to protect sensitive documents from someone with physical access to the computer and for most people that's easily provided just by keeping the few sensitive documents most normal users have in a password-protected disk image and protecting passwords by not keeping them in an open text file, as many people rather stupidly do).

7. Intego security or any other antivirus or privacy protection; those are usually unnecessary, there being no confirmed viruses or worms and only a handful of trojan-horse programs, and such programs often actually cause systemic problems.

Regards.

I agree; Little Snitch causes more problem than it cures unless the user is well versed in using it. It's very easy with LS to make a system just about unusable if you don't know what you're doing.

Regards.

varjak paw wrote:

I agree; Little Snitch causes more problem than it cures unless the user is well versed in using it. It's very easy with LS to make a system just about unusable if you don't know what you're doing.

Regards.

I don't know about the new LS 3, I'm still using the 2. But when I first started using LS some years ago I had hardly any knowledge about using it. I might have unnecessarily prevented a few sites from loading, but that was about the extent of the "damage" I did. Essential system rules are protected. (Although later on, I disabled some of those with no ill effects.)

I've seen users completely cut off their Internet access, in some cases disabling applications, by misunderstanding and hence misusing Little Snitch. It's a good tool if you know what it's doing and what it's telling you and can determine whether an application or process should or should not be allowed to connect, but for the average user I recommend avoiding it. In the vast majority of cases it's really unnecessary, IMO.

Regards.

I would definitely avoid Little Snitch, then, or you're likely to get a lot of calls on the order of "this is asking me whether to allow or block xxx; what should I do?", particularly when they install anything new. There's so little malware that can infect Mac OS X that instructing them on basic "safe computing" practice is probably going to be just as effective.

Regards.

I would definitely avoid Little Snitch

I wouldn't. Give the OP the benefit of the doubt. LS is very easy to use & understand as long as you read its tutorial.

As a long time user of LS, my usage started out exactly like WZZZ and belive me, if I haven't melted my comp or the internet yet, anybody can use it. 😝

I've seen users completely cut off their Internet access, in some cases disabling applications, by misunderstanding and hence misusing Little Snitch.

Because they did not read the user manual/tutorial.

😁

Are you the "go to" tech guy?

Baby Boomer (USofA) wrote:

Because they did not read the user manual/tutorial.

Yep. But how many people read manuals, and of those that do how many understand what they read?

In any case, it's not the OP asking for his own use but his friends, and I again think that he'd get more calls from them in a panic about what LS is asking than the protection will be worth.

Regards.

FYI

From the U.S. Federal Trade Commission:

http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/court-tells-tech-support-scammers-pay