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Little Snitch is a host-based firewall for OS X that allows granular control of both in and outbound network connections. It has an intuitive and easy to use interface that pops up notifications when any application attempts to connect out to the Internet. Setting rules to temporarily or permanently allow or deny connections can be done with a single click. Little Snitch is a closed-source application that costs $29.95 but the demo version can be downloaded and ran for free. One completely free firewall alternative to Little Snitch called GlowWorm (version 1.5.2) is not recommended because it causes OS X 10.5.4 to crash upon rebooting and requires loading in to single user mode to disable the application.

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

Installing Apple Open Firmware adds an additional layer of protection to an Apple computer by requiring a password to be entered before accessing one of the many potentially compromising start-up options This password can be removed by anyone with physical access to the computer by resetting a section of memory called the PRAM.

1) Change the amount of memory in the computer by adding or removing a stick of memory.
2) Turn the computer on.
3) Hold down Command, Option, ‘p’, and ‘r’ at the same time until the computer beeps and reboots three times. The password has now been removed.

To prevent this attack the Apple computer needs to have access to the memory physically locked and secured.

Some web sites request personal information from the user before granting them access to certain areas of the web site. Sites like online newspapers, forums, and businesses use this technique in an attempt to get more information about who is accessing the data but this can easily be circumvented by entering in false information. BugMeNot.com is a collection of generic accounts for many different web sites. Go to http://www.bugmenot.com, type in the website address and it will list any available logins sorted by a community-input percentage of either working or not. New accounts are added by visitors to the web site.

There is also a FireFox plugin available for BugMeNot. After installation right click on the login field of a web site and select “Login with BugMeNot”. The plugin will automatically cycle through any available logins to that site in its’ database.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6349