Over the weekend, a nasty, but small scale little piece of ransomware was found in the Transmission BitTorrent client. One way to avoid this type of malware infection is to verify the checksums for anything you download. Blogger Jacob Salmela created a script for the Mac file manager, Hazel that verifies downloads automatically.




A lot of developers post checksums or hashes alongside their download links so you can verify that what you download is legit software. A checksum is a mathematical calculation run on a file. If a file’s been altered, the checksum will be different than what the developer posts. That means you can usually verify the validity of a file you download by comparing the two numbers. You can do this verification on your Mac super easily with a few terminal commands, but Salmela’s Hazel script automatically scrubs your downloads folder for you. Once you set it up, Hazel creates a pop-up so you can compare the numbers. It makes that simple precaution of verifying checksums a little easier. Head over to Salmela’s site for the full guide.

Prevent Ransomware By Automatically Finding the Checksum of Downloaded Files | Jacob Salmela

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