[coned88]

My concern with these hackintosh systems is safety. Tools like Unibeast/Clover and whatever else. They manipulate the OSX install image. It all seems to work but then you type in your credentials for the bank or work into a browser and who knows if the OS is compromised.

Is it safe? That is the question.

[roblabla]

Clover is fully open source. And it's not too complicated to follow along, so it's actually a fairly auditable piece of software.

I've been using hackintosh for a while, and it's almost a vanilla OSX with the exception of Clover and FakeSMC. I doubt there's any malware in there...

[op00to]

> I doubt there's any malware in there...

Famous last words. Unless the builds are verifiable, they're not trustable. Open source doesn't do you any good if you don't know that the binary that you download and run doesn't do something weird.

[roblabla]

I doubt you verify every bit of binaries you download.

Open source gives you the possibility of knowing your binary is good, by compiling it yourself. I chose not to do so, because I couldn't really be bothered. But others who need this kind of security could, and I would hope they do.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Can this be answered by doing a security review of the Hackintosh installation?

Would all that is necessary be to put the Hackintosh behind a network inspector, say Wireshark, to check if anything nefarious or unexpected is going on.

[op00to]

What if the traffic was masked - say certain "routine" DNS queries to kick off a request to get further commands to run? I wouldn't be worried about facile root kits, but higher quality attacks that are way harder to detect.