Little Snitch 1.1 ($24.95 Shareware)
Objective Development

For those lucky Mac users who have a high-speed internet connection, such as a cable modem or DSL, the benefits of an always-on, high-speed connection come with one drawback. Namely, that since the connection is always on, and you typically are assigned a specific IP address, your machine is a sitting duck for attack by anyone on the Internet. Fortunately, between software firewalls, such as the one included with Panther, and hardware devices, such as a Linksys WRT54G, you can be pretty well protected against people trying to get into your machine. But what about programs that try to initiate connections from your Mac to the outside world?

Little Snitch is an application that watches your Mac's outgoing TCP/IP traffic, and alerts you to any suspicious behavior. Of course, there are many types of connections that your Mac makes which shouldn't be a cause of concern, such as Web surfing. Fortunately, Little Snitch contains an initial set of rules allowing such common services as Web surfing, Domain Name Service (DNS), Network Time Protocol (NTP) and others. You can add your own rules manually, but the real fun comes when Little Snitch detects that something funny is going on.

Little Snitch Just Detected a Potential Security Issue

The above image shows what happens when Little Snitch detects outgoing network traffic that it doesn't have a rule for. At this point, you can do a few different things. Since the example image shows Dreamweaver trying to contact Macromedia, which we assume is to make sure we are running the latest version, we'll allow the connection. You can decide to allow the connection once, while the application is running, or forever to create a permanent rule. You can also define the scope of the rule, which would be any connection to the destination server, or restrict the connection by port, server or both.

Depending on how paranoid you are, you can just make a temporary rule and be alerted any time an application tries to connection to the outside world, but you may get tired of this. The demo of Little Snitch does everything the full version does, but only for 3 hours at a time.

So make sure you know who your Mac is talking to, and give Little Snitch a try today!

Have any other Gadgets that let you know what your Mac is up to? Send an e-mail to John, and he'll check it out.