Little Snitch Review: Your Personal Snitch

As many of us know, the Mac is safer than the PC because there are not as many viruses and key-loggers. However, that does not mean that we are perfectly safe because there is still another kind of thing to worry about; applications phoning home. Regular virus scanners cannot protect you against applications connecting to outside servers, which is why Objective Development’s Little Snitch should become part of your security arsenal.

Applications phoning home can actually be more of a worry for us Mac users that viruses are. Most applications only phone home to check for updates and sometimes even to validate serial numbers, however, it is possible for malicious apps to do it to steal your information. When your computer is infected with a virus, you may notice things running weirdly, but if an application phones home, we may never know. You may ask, what can an application actually phone home? Well, a malicious app could gain access to much of your personal information on your Mac (including email) and then send it back to the creator. While this might scare, there are only very few apps that phone home maliciously and these apps usually look questionable from the start.

When you first install Little Snitch, you will get a lot of dialogues asking you whether to allow or deny certain connections. All these dialogues may seem daunting, but there are not usually this many at once; there are only this many because you just installed it. On each of these dialogues, you have a few options. First, you can choose to allow or deny the connection once, until the application quits or forever. Then, you choose what connection it is actually allowing or denying. The options are always as follows: Any Connection, [the port that the connection is trying to connect from], [the URL that the connection is trying to connect thru] and [the second and the third options]. The first one is pretty self explanatory, but the others may not be. Allowing all connections on the specific port can sometimes mean allowing all connections, because some applications access everything using the same port. However, allowing only connections to a certain URL will not usually result in allowing all connections. And then the fourth option will really only allow that exact connection.

Little Snitch provides a nice HUD that shows you the current connections being made. You may-or-may-not want to have this visible, because it can get very distracting. On this window, the green bar shows you how much data is being downloaded, and the red bar shows how much data is being uploaded. If you click on one of the items, it will show you all the connections associated with it that are currently running. If you click on the stay visible button in the top-right corner of the HUD, the HUD will stay visible, even when no connections are being made. I think that this HUD can be nice for some people, but it can also be very distracting for others, which is why I don’t use it.

You can actually use Little Snitch without ever opening the actual applications, but you still may want to. In this application, you can see connections you have allowed based on what application they are for. If an application no longer exists, it will appear in red with a ! next to it. If you want to edit a certain connection, just double-click on it and you will see a dialogue. This dialogue provides many more options that the one I talked about earlier does. Here, you can edit what server the connection can go to, like Local Network or a certain IP Address. You can also enable or disable the connection by clicking on the Enabled checkbox. If you want to Prevent Changes to these rules, just click the Prevent Changes toolbar item, and then you will have to enter your password to change any of the rules here. If you want to only see certain processes like GUI Applications or System Processes, you can just click on the popup in the upper-left corner of the window, and choose what to see. If you go to the Monitor pane of Little Snitch>Preferences…, you can choose whether to see network activity in the menubar or whether to see the HUD I talked about earlier.

Objective Development’s Little Snitch retails for $29.95 and you can download a free trial from their site. Although it really only does one thing, it does it well, and it’s the only application of its kind. If you are concerned about people getting your personal information, then I suggest that you give it a try and tell us what you think.

Disclaimer: Our sponsor, MacUpdate, is currently offering a Promo Holiday Bundle that includes Little Snitch and 9 other great Mac apps for only $49.99. This review was written without any influence from MacUpdate or the developer. If you would like to purchase the bundle, click here.

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