Google has one of the largest managed fleets of Macintosh computers in the world. With tens of thousands of assets to manage and an ever-changing security landscape, the organization has had to develop many of its own tools to effectively maintain its fleet and keep its end-users safe and productive. Macintosh Operations is the internal team tasked with developing these tools and managing these machines globally. [..]

Frustrated fanbois rejoice as Facebook releases MIDAS Mac security tool

Open source framework lets admins homebrew their own tools

Facebook and Etsy have teamed-up to develop and publish as open source a security tool for Apple's Macs, following similar moves by Google.

The "Project MIDAS" Mac intrusion detection framework was announced by Facebook in a blog post on Friday, and sees the two companies collaborate on a tool to help companies manage large deployments of Macs.

The Python-based MIDAS framework lets Mac admins monitor clients for things such as changes to kernel extensions, LaunchAgents, LaunchDaemons, and Network Configurations.

"This gives you the ability to quickly audit your assets for threats like IceFog, Dockster, Imuler, Morcut, PubSab, etc," they write.

It is extensible, and the initial open source code comes with a few helper utilities, and an example module for client monitoring.

Code for the project is stored on Github .

With the tech, Facebook and Etsy have joined Google in building their own custom tools for managing Macs. Google was compelled to build its own suite of Mac management tools – many of which it plans to publish as open source – due to Apple's lack of willingness to provide new features in a timely manner.

Though Apple has recently seen great success in consumer electronics, it has also stepped back from providing tools to the enterprise.

In recent years, for instance, it retired its Apple server line, and slowed the pace at which it updated its main management software and its workhorse Mac Pro.

Though this devotion of resources to the larger and faster-growing markets of iPads, iPhones, and other iWotsits is sensible from a business point of view, it seems to be causing grief among Valley tech companies due to their employees' love of Mac products.