The Find My app combines Find My iPhone and Find My Friends into a single app for iOS 13, iPadOS, and macOS Catalina. If you need help finding it, use Search on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, or use Spotlight on your Mac. You can also share locations or find missing devices on iCloud.com.

If you don't have iOS 13, iPadOS, macOS Catalina, or watchOS 6, set up and use Find My iPhone and Find My Friends instead of Find My, or log in to iCloud.com.

With Find My, you can locate and protect your Mac if it's ever lost or stolen. You need to set up Find My Mac before it goes missing. To turn it on, simply choose Apple menu  > System Preferences, click Apple ID, then click iCloud. If you believe that your Mac was stolen, contact your local law enforcement.

Mac security researcher Pedro Vilaca has discovered a flaw in Apple computers that leaves them vulnerable to a remote hack. Normally this code is mostly read-only, but as the Mac wakes up there is a hole in its security, and the code can be changed remotely. May 05, 2020  Part 1. Can iPhone be hacked or not? If you are looking for a straightforward answer, yes, iPhones can be hacked. Although it is a pretty disturbing fact, your iPhones can be hacked despite Apple’s strict safety features. Although some of the people don’t accept this fact, every digital device is vulnerable to threats more or less.

Use Find My to locate your computer

If you set up Find My Mac before your Mac was lost or stolen, you can use it to locate your Mac on a map, or play a sound to help you find it. You can also use it to remotely lock or erase your Mac. To use Find My, sign in to iCloud.com on another computer or open the Find My app for iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

Locate your Mac on a map

Open the Find My app and select your Mac from the list of devices to view its location on a map and get directions.

Play a sound

If your Mac is nearby, you can have it play a sound to help you or someone nearby find it.

Lock your Mac

Can My Mac Be Hacked Remotely Password

You can use Find My to mark your computer as lost, which remotely locks it with a passcode. You can also display a custom message on its screen.

Erase your Mac

You can use Find My to remotely erase all your personal information from your Mac.

What if my Mac is shut down or offline?

If your Mac is turned off or offline, you can still use Find My to request a notification when it’s located, or lock or erase it remotely. The next time your Mac is online, the actions take effect. If you remove your Mac from Find My when it's offline, your requests are canceled.

How do I unlock my Mac?

After you locate your Mac, you can unlock it with your passcode on iCloud.com. Make sure to use the passcode that you created when you locked it with Find My, not your device passcode.

Here's how to see the passcode that you used to lock your Mac:

1. Sign in to icloud.com/find.
2. Select your Mac from the Devices menu.
3. Select Unlock. After you follow the steps to verify your identity, you'll see the passcode that you need to unlock your Mac.

You can look up your passcode for a limited time. If you forget your passcode or can't verify your identity to see it, take your Mac to an Apple Authorized Service Provider along with your proof of purchase.

If you can't find your Mac

Find My Mac is the only Apple service that can help track or locate a lost Mac. If you didn’t set up Find My Mac before your Mac was lost, or you can’t locate it, these steps might help you protect your data:

1. Change your Apple ID password to prevent anyone from accessing your iCloud data or using other services (such as iMessage or iTunes) from your Mac.
2. Change your passwords for other accounts you use with your Mac, including email, banking, and social sites like Facebook or Twitter.
3. Report your lost or stolen Mac to local law enforcement. They might request the serial number of your computer. You can find this information on the original box or receipt you received when you purchased your Mac.

You turn on your MacBook and feel that something is wrong: some files have disappeared, or new files were added. You wonder if someone has been watching your computer.

So, how to tell if someone is remotely accessing your MacBook? You need to check your logs, verify that no new users were created, make sure that remote login, screen sharing and remote management are disabled, and no spyware is running on your computer.

First things first. If you suspect that someone is controlling your laptop and if there is a chance that they watching you thru the webcam immediately apply a cover on laptop’s webcam. You can find my favorite webcam covers here.

What is remote access and how is it configured on MacBooks?

There are three ways to access MacOS remotely: allow remote logins from another computer, enable Screen Sharing or allow access by using Remote Desktop. Both ways are legitimate, but if you don’t remember doing any of them you need to know how to turn on and off those possibilities.

Remote login to MacOS

Computers that run MacOS as an operating system can log in to your Mac using Secure Shell (SSH). Steps to enable remote login are the following:

1. Go to System Preferences. You can get there by clicking on the apple icon on the left of the top bar. After you clicked on apple icon you will see a drop-down menu where you should click on System Preferences menu item.
2. Find Sharing folder and double click. Click on Remote Login checkbox on the left.
3. Now you have the option to allow access either for all user or only specific users.

Once Remote Login is enabled then users with access can use SSH to log in and browse your computer’s contents.

Access to Mac screen using Screen Sharing

If you need help from IT to make changes on your MacBook or maybe you are collaborating on a project and want to share your screen you can enable Screen Sharing. Steps to enable as follows:

1. Go to System Preferences.
2. Find Sharing folder and double click. Click on Screen Sharing checkbox on the left.
3. Allow access either for all user or only specific users.

Now on another Mac (from which you want to access to your Mac) start Screen Sharing app. You can start it by clicking Command and Space buttons. In a popup form type Sharing and hit Enter. Type your computer name. In my case, I had to type in “dev-pros-MacBook-Pro.local”.

A new window will pop up with the shared screen of another computer. Now you can control the screen.

Remote Desktop with Remote Management

Finally, it is possible to login to a computer with MacOS by enabling Remote Desktop. Steps to enable as follows:

1. Go to System Preferences.
2. Find Sharing folder and double click. Click on Remote Management check box on the left.
3. Allow access either for all user or only specific users.
4. There will be different Sharing options where you can fine-tune the type of access to allow: observe, change settings, delete, copy and even restart the computer.

Now you can access this Mac from Apple Remote Desktop – it’s an application you can buy from Apple Store and at the time of writing it’s cost was $79.99.

If your Mac is being monitored, it will show this image (two rectangles) in the top right-hand corner near your computer time:

When that symbol appears, you will be able to tell if you are being monitored. You can also disconnect the viewer by clicking on Disconnect option:

You can also click on “Open Sharing Preferences…” which will open Sharing folder in System Preferences.

Since the question you had was if someone remotely accessing your computer then the chances are that you don’t need any of sharing capabilities mentioned above.

In this case, check all options on Sharing folder under System Preferences to make sure that nobody is allowed to access it and turn off (uncheck) all options.

Verify if new users were created

As we’ve seen already remote login or sharing options require assigning access roles to the local users. If your system was hacked it is very likely that the hacker has added a new user to access it. To find out all users in MacOS perform the following steps:

My Mac Has Been Hacked

1. Start Terminal app by either going to Applications and then Utilities folder or clicking Command and Space and typing Terminal in the popup window.
2. In the Terminal window type:

On my laptop it listed dev1, nobody, root and daemon.

If you see the accounts, you do not recognize then they probably have been created by a hacker.

In order to find when the user account was used to log in last time type the following command into the Terminal:
last

For each account, MacOS will list the times and dates of logins. If the login to any of the accounts happened at an abnormal time, it is possible that a hacker used a legitimate account to log in.

Check the logs

It may be useful to check the system logs for any possible access issues.

In order to find a system log, click on Go option in the top menu or simultaneously click Shift, Command and G. In the “Go to Folder” popup type: /var/log and hit Enter.

Now find system.log file and scan for word sharing. For instance, I found following screen sharing log entries:

These were log entries when someone logged in to my system remotely:

Mac Computer Hacked

Check for spyware

Can Apple Computers Be Hacked

If you are still suspecting that spyware is running on your machine you can use a third party application like Little Snitch which monitors applications, preventing or permitting them to connect to attached networks through advanced rules. Setting up the rules for Little Snitch, however, could be complicated.

Can A Mac Get Hacked

One of the common spyware applications is a keystroke logger or keylogger. Keyloggers used to be apps that record the letters you type on the keyboard, but they significantly in last years. Suffice to day that keyloggers can take screenshots every 30 seconds or even track your chat activity, including the messages sent to you.

I believe that keyloggers are much greater security threat because they are easier to install and the powerful features they offer. Check my article about keyloggers here: How to know if my Mac has a keylogger

Security Best Practices

Can A Phone Be Hacked

1.Change passwords regularly
One thing you should immediately if you are suspecting that someone is logging to your system is to change your password. And the password should be complex enough so that other people wouldn’t be able to guess it. This means avoiding using things like birthdate, first or last name or relatives, house or apartment number, etc. As a rule of thumb the password must be long enough (8 – 32 characters) and include at least 3 of the following character types:

• Uppercase letter (A-Z)
• Lowercase letter (a-z)
• Digit number (0-9)
• Special characters such as ~!@#$%^&*

2.Enable Security Updates by clicking on “Automatically keep my Mac up to date” in Software Update folder in System Preferences.

3. Install Antivirus. I received a lot of emails where people described suspicious activity on their Macs. I found that in about 60-70% cases, the culprit was malwareand not someone breaking into the computer. It’s a myth that Macs don’t get viruses. If you need proof check the next article I wrote after testing 12 antivirus programs after injecting 117 malware samples on my Mac:

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