Mac Question: Is someone accessing my computer?

Asked by PandoraBoxx (18031

) September 30th, 2009

I clicked on my HD archive to look for some photographs in the All Images file, and when I did, I noticed that in addition to the >Devices, >Places, >Displayed dropdowns on the left hand side of the window, there was also one for >Shared. Under Shared, there was intel_black, mike_pc, and one other name that was in the similar to mike_pc. I have never seen that before.

I cleaned out the caches, turned off bluetooth, and changed the name of my computer to something more obscure, and the >Shared dropdown disappeared.

I’ve tried looking on apple.com, and googling it, but am stymied as to how to describe this in searchable terms.

Any clue as to what was going on, and was it a bad thing?

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4 Answers

You were on a network and what you saw was the shared access to other computers on that network.

You should not have been at risk, unless you have enabled sharing on your own computer. Even then, you would likely only have been sharing those parts of your drive that you had enabled shared access to.

Macs out of the box are not so easily accessible for other computers on the same network, unless it is intentional.

whitenoise (14162

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As whitenoise said you were not really at risk, unless you have manually allowed sharing of important folders. In order for those listed computer to actually have access to your files they would have to connect as you, which means they would need your password. to change the folders they normally have access to, go to sharing in system preferences

waterskier2007 (2068

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Thanks for the clarification! There should not have been anyone else on the network. All the sharing is disabled so I feel better.

PandoraBoxx (18031

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