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While it’s true that Mac OS X is a much more secure operating system than Windows at this point, With time and the increase in popularity of the Mac platfrom there will come a day when some exploit or another will be successful against it. If you use the internet (and you do) and especially if you have a laptop with information on it you wouldn’t want someone else to access if they stole it, then you owe it to yourself to take a few minutes to make your Mac more secure.

Here’s a good article from Cocoia Blog on how to harden your Mac against common threats. You don’t need to develop full-blown paranoia, but instituting some of the simpler suggestions here will take minutes and may save you from disaster at some future point.

If, like me, you shoot to a laptop on location and find yourself accessing the internet from all kinds of locations in your downtime, you need to acknowledge you’re at risk for a stolen laptop or possibly an attempt to gain access to your machine though one of it’s ports. You should at least follow the advice in this article to secure those ports with your built-in firewall and secure your machine by (again, at least) disabling auto-login.

I would recommend spending the 10-20 minutes to give this a serious read and to institute the changes you feel comfortable making yourself. Someday, you’ll be glad you did.

(If your’e really hardcore, there’s even a link in the comments to the NSA (yes, that NSA) which has a publicly-available paper on how to secure Panther. Who Knew?)

[update: Part 2 of this article entitled 'An even more secure OS X before Leopard' was just posted. This second part is probably too deep for most, but if you're really into security, you might want to look it over. For the average user, it's probably overkill]