“Apple has included a new security feature in OS X ‘El Capitan’ to aid in maintaining system security,” Jesus Vigo writes for TechRepublic. “Dubbed System Integrity Protection (SIP), this technology minimizes the possibility of malware or known vulnerabilities from compromising a system due to unrestricted root access.”
“The concept is sometimes referred to as “rootless” by preventing changes, even though the user who is logged in may have root privileges on the device,” Vigo writes. “This mitigates security threats, for example, by preventing the installation of malware to a protected directory or denying unauthorized user access to modify a system file.”
“Why would you ever want to disable this? Well, it doesn’t affect the majority of OS X users — including power users — but the technology may disallow the installation of a particular update or software application that has been flagged as a false positive,” Vigo writes. “It is in these specific, yet rare instances that SIP could be disabled temporarily to allow for the process to proceed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Almost nobody will need this, so leave SIP alone unless you understand exactly why you want to temporarily disable it.