Little Snitch – An OS X Necessity

I’m surprised more and more everyday when I find Mac owners that don’t have the greatest app ever created, Little Snitch, installed. If you too are unfamiliar with Little Snitch, let’s go through what the application does and why it is absolutely necessary for you to have it installed on your computer.

Firewall commonly protects your computer against unwanted guests from the Internet and Little Snitch protects your private data from being sent out.

The first question I ever ask someone before explaining what the program does is, “Do you worry about your computer’s security?” To which they usually reply, “Yes, that’s why I have a firewall installed.” Well, truthfully, a firewall doesn’t provide all of the protection you need while you browse the web. See, a firewall is only capable of stopping inbound traffic, that is, information packets coming from the Internet to your computer. But, what if your firewall missed one of those packets one day and some nasty Malware or virus ended up on your machine and began to send data from your computer back to the Internet. If the firewall missed this little beast, there would be nothing you could do to stop it from sending all of your private information back across the Internet to some other computer on the other side of the globe. What can you do to prevent this from happening?

Enter Little Snitch, an application for Mac OSX that monitors all outbound Internet traffic and lets the user control which information goes out and which information doesn’t. By monitoring all outbound Internet ports, Little Snitch is capable of blocking Internet traffic on your instant messenger application but keep things flowing for your web browser. The initial setup of Little Snitch could be considered cumbersome because there are simply so many options to choose from, but once you have rules set for all of your web applications, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Installation consists of little more than downloading the application from the company’s website, unzipping the folder, installing, and then restarting. When the program is up and running you will be prompted every time an application tries to access the Internet from your computer. This includes your anti-virus application, web browser, instant messengers, and everything in between. But, like I said earlier, once you set the parameters for the application, it remembers them and keeps things moving along without you noticing.

If the pop-up reminders get to be a little annoying, you can setup Little Snitch to run in the program tray and a simple mouse-over of the icon will tell you all current network activity in and out. And if you opt to keep the pop-ups going, making Little Snitch rank the severity of the outbound message is easy as well. Instead of nagging you when you try and send an email, it can use presets to determine which traffic is dangerous and which traffic isn’t, and only notify you about things that it determines to be potentially dangerous. Hopefully you will heed my advice of installing Little Snitch and as a result, enjoy a happier, safer computer.

This post is written by guest author Uttoran Sen. He is a webmaster and professional blogger since 2005, he owns and manages Tech Nascent. You can follow him on Twitter.

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