Is it still secure to use Snow Leopard?

macintoshJake wrote:

When you say to keep it off of a network, do you mean my home network with internet access?

Yup, any kind of internet. Technically, it's probably not going to hurt if you stay on your home network and only check e-mail, but anything more than that exposes you to potential risk. It's a small risk, though, as Snow Leopard market share will only drop with time, but it's nonetheless a non-zero risk. It would be much higher risk if someone knowledgeable, or with a lot of resources to hire someone knowledgeable, had reason to attack you specifically and knew you were still running Snow Leopard.

While I have read there are ways around...

I recommend that you get a littlesnitch. littlesnitch will track your Web traffic and tell you which applications are sending data from your computer. Be sure to run it awhile because it will trigger a number of alerts. In trail mode, it will run for three hours per boot for a about a month.

http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Make a full backup of your machine. Should you ever get hacked, you can restore your machine from the backup.

I suggest you get an external firewire harddrive and clone your startup disk.

Carbon Copy Cloner will copy your startup drive to an external firewire drive. You can boot from the external drive to verify that you have a good clone. When you upgrade your existing startup drive, you can at any time boot from your external drive and go back to your existing system.

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs!

You definitely should not be using Safari. All that's needed is to hit one bad website and you're done.

>>I assume you mean that in the context of using Safari...?

What don't you understand about "You definitely should not be using Safari." Does saying it again make it any clearer? OK, don't use Safari.

Sorry about that, but I just found the question unbelievable: I had already said, early on, that Safari wasn't being updated, and to use Firefox instead. And then, when you said you still preferred to use it, it seemed you didn't realize the seriousness of this. So I said it again, but this time so it would get through more strongly, "just hit one bad site and game over." When you asked the question about context, I was thinking that you really didn't want to accept the bad news about Safari.

Here's an older sample of vulnerabilities patched by a Safari update.

"Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution," Apple noted in its advisory.

"Arbitrary code execution" means that some bad guy can run whatever they want through your browser and on into your user and system.

Just over a month after it released Safari 7.0.4 and Safari 6.1.4, Apple made available on Monday Safari 7.0.5 and Safari 6.1.5. A total of 12 security flaws affecting WebKit have been addressed with the latest releases. The vulnerabilities could lead to unexpected application termination, arbitrary code execution, disclosure of local file content, and domain name spoofing.

http://www.securityweek.com/apple-patches-multiple-vulnerabilities-safari-web-br owser

And

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203007

And a more recent one.

http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204243

You may eventually come to prefer Firefox. It is far more customizable than Safari and most other browsers, and there are add-ons/extensions for just about anything. Besides its customizability, one of the main reasons I use it is because of NoScript, for its heightened security, which you may want to look into.

https://noscript.net/features

https://forums.informaction.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=268

Another one I wouldn't want to be without is Adblock Plus, with filter subscriptions EasyList and EasyPrivacy. When you set it up, "Allow some non-intrusive advertising," in Filter Preferences, is checked by default. You may want to uncheck that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

Just updated to Firefox 36. What's been fixed:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox/

Don't listen to all these people telling you NOT to use Safari. I have a iMac from 2010 and have not liked any OS X since Snow Leopard. All bells and whistles and loss of functionality (not to mention commandeering much of your RAM). I have 8GB of RAM and could easily upgrade to Yosemite but won't. Yeah it's annoying when you visit certain sites and they use user agent detection and try and force you to upgrade but I won't. All these people love to try an scare you into converting by saying OMG your computer will be toast if you hit one bad site. It could happen to any computer on any OS X. Just be smart and never download weird things. I always go to my library in finder and clear out caches, cookies, metadata, clear all local storage etc. I don't use extensions and deny all third party cookies. I clean daily. You can use older OS X/ Safari just use common sense on the internet. Don't listen to scare tactics. My g/f has yosemite and hates it. I've messed with it and it's really annoying. Not everyone wants mobile everything. I like desktop everything. Snow Leopard is very fast for me as like I said before I clear anything that could slow it down constantly.