Free lesson 1 of 10 from macOS for Hackers — The Unix desktop and its security model. No account, no card.
macOS sits on a huge share of developer, executive, and creative workstations, which makes it a high value target and a system every serious defender and penetration tester should understand. It is also, unusually, a mainstream desktop built on a real Unix foundation, so much of what you learn here transfers directly to servers and other Unix like systems.
Underneath the friendly interface, macOS is a certified UNIX operating system. Its core, Darwin, is open source and combines a Mach based kernel with a BSD userland. That means a familiar shell, familiar file permissions, and familiar tooling, wrapped in a modern, tightly integrated security model that we will spend most of this course unpacking.
Mach-O binaries.Everything here should be practiced on a machine you own and control. A spare Mac wiped to a clean install is ideal. If you only have one Mac, create a separate standard test user account so experiments never touch your daily data, and enable Time Machine or another backup first.
Running macOS inside a virtual machine is possible on Apple hardware and is excellent for snapshots and quick resets. Whatever you choose, keep the test system isolated from sensitive accounts and never point any technique at hardware or accounts you are not authorized to test.
⚖️ For authorized, legal testing only.
10 lessons · knowledge checks · final exam · verifiable certificate · in-browser Live-Lab
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