Little Snitch for Mac OSX Little Snitch is a network monitoring program for Mac OS X developed by Objective Development.

It’s a shareware program that lets you know when another program tries to “phone home” or access an outbound port on your computer. You can easily install the program by downloading the .dmg file then dragging it into the applications folder. While this may seem like a superfluous program to have on a Mac, it is nice to be able to decide when and how certain programs access the net. Little Snitch isn’t a firewall, instead it uses the programs name to let you know what’s happening. For example, does the realplayer really NEED to phone home? You can decide. Although malware is limited for OSX, trojans can still potentially be downloaded and installed by the user.

Little Snitch will detect the network activity and let you know so you can block it. In demo mode Little Snitch is fully functional, but only for 3 hours after start up. You can easily reset this timer (they even tell you how) so that it will run for another 3 hours after that. If you decide to purchase, it’s $24.95. Not too expensive. It’s important to keep the dmg file after downloading in case you want to uninstall. This is one of the programs you can’t just drag to the trash.