Apple announced a new yellow iPhone color this week, which invokes spring thoughts, but here in the Netherlands we have had the most wintry weather this season. I hope spring comes quickly after this last effort of winter.
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Hunting for Honkbox: Multistage macOS Cryptominer May Still Be Hiding
Learn how Honkbox hides on macOS and evades detection. This post contains details of a previously undocumented variant, along with further IOCs and behaviors for threat hunters and SOC teams.
Spring will also bring the “Spring updates” of macOS and iOS and we did get another round of betas this week. These updates which are about half way between Apple’s major platform updates often come with significant changes, especially for admins. From what we can tell from the betas, the changes this year seem be on the “less impactful” side. A welcome respite for MacAdmins.
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News and Opinion
- Apple Vision Accessibility: the AppleVis Report Card – AppleVis
- Screen Time is Unreliable –Brian Stucki
- Depth or Breadth in IT – Pam Lefkowitz
- Do I Have Imposter Syndrome? – Pam Lefkowitz
macOS and iOS Updates
- Apple School Manager User Guide, March 2023 revisions
- Apple Business Manager User Guide, March 2023 revisions
- tvOS 16.3.3
Security and Privacy
Support and HowTos
- Reproducible Builds for macOS – Mike Lynn
- Custom Finder icons, resources and Mac OS history – Howard Oakley
- Eighty Shades of Option Key – Guillaume Gète
- What is PkgInfo, and how do you use custom Munki PkgInfo? – Meredith Kreisa, SimpleMDM
- Beware of the expiry of APNS tokens! – Guilleaume Gète
- DFU Blaster, to activate DFU mode in one click – Guilleaume Gète
- Microsoft macOS Conditional Access replaced in Jamf Pro 10.43 – Katie John, Jamf Blog
- Jamf Protect SSO with AzureAD with SAML – skartek.dev
- adespoton/utmconfigs: Config files for booting Mac OS 9 and OS X on UTM emulator
- How does Ventura check an app’s security? – Howard Oakley
- Guide: Creating a Signed Certificate – Tech IT Out
- Setting a user account to automatically log in using sysadminctl on macOS Ventura – Rich Trouton
Scripting and Automation
- Jamf Pro API and Apple’s Swift: Part 5, Building the SwiftUI App – Armin Briegel (blog post, series overview)
Updates and Releases
- Setup-Your-Mac 1.8.0 (blog post, v1.8.1rc)
- Baseline v1.0.0 (blog post)
- Outset 4.0 Beta 1 (blog post)
- ScreenNudge v1.7
- micromdm/nanomdm v0.5.0 ·
- Microsoft Adds Free Outlook Tier – Michael Tsai
To Watch
- Dutch Mac Admins Meetup at Xebia – AppleShare IT
- Deploying Apple Silicon Macs with DFU Blaster, MDS, and Apple Configurator – Twocanoes Software
To Listen
- Time Machine Blues – Command-Control-Power
- Inside Baseball: Getting What You Need From Product Managers – Mac Admins Podcast
- Current Mobile Security Landscape – Jamf After Dark
- What are the latest K-12 IT trends? – Apple @ Work Podcast, 9to5Mac
Just for Fun
Support
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