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Objective Development's Little Snitch for Mac OS X shows you who's opening ports, and trying to snoop into your system
"My students started asking why there were ads blinking in the top menu bar of the software program they were running. I was appalled! " says Fred Showker, digital graphics instructor at JMU, "We installed Little Snitch and found too many programs under OS X open new ports and begin covert communications with unknown, outsiders."
If you run ethernet, broadband, or any "always connected" network on the Mac OS X, then you need a security application that monitors outgoing network connections. Objective Development, from Vienna, Austria, has rolled out and all new update of their powerful security program Little Snitch 1.1.
If you do not like the idea of information possibly being gathered from your computer and being sent to who-knows-where for who-knows-what, Little Snitch helps.
When opening applications some of them want to connect back to their authors' server, for instance to check for new versions. Some of them don't even tell you or ask for permission and you cannot control which information they send back. This is where Little Snitch jumps in: It pauses the application and brings up an alert, telling you which application tries to connect to which server. The remote server will only be contacted if you explicitly allow it. For routine decisions, Little Snitch can be configured. By creating rules you can always block or allow particular connections.
Little Snitch provides a free, built-in demo mode with all the functionality of the registered version. The only limitation is that it will disable itself after three hours and you must start it again manually.
Showker comments:
"Once you see how many people are trying to get into your system, you'll gladly pay the shareware fee -- and they're not just the sleazy underworld characters either, we had visits from Adobe, Microsoft and even Apple! But it's the other "unknowns" you have to really worry about -- the hackers, zombie spammers, and alertware predators."
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