Little Snitch is a host-based application firewall for macOS that monitors applications’ network activity and gives you control over your private outgoing data. It alerts you about applications attempting to connect to the internet, allowing you to permit or deny these connections, thus protecting your privacy and keeping your data secure. Little Snitch is ideal if you want more insight into and control over your network activity.
Key Features:
- Network Monitoring: Track background activity and see real-time network traffic information, including data volumes, server locations, and ports/protocols.
- Permission Control: Decide which applications can connect to the internet and set rules for future connection attempts.
- Silent Mode: Automatically allow new connections and make decisions about them at your leisure.
- Hierarchical Organization: Group connections by app, domain, or country, helping you understand your Mac’s network activity.
- Traffic Chart Insights: Visualize your Mac’s current and past network activity, identifying unusual data transmissions.
- Search Functionality: Easily find connections, rules, and recently denied connections.
- Rule Customization: Create and manage rules to suit your needs, including bidirectional rules for incoming and outgoing connections.
- Sound Notifications: Get acoustic feedback for specific network connections and activities, even when your screen is off.
- Blocklists: Curated blocklists for various topics (e.g., Advertising, Tracking, Malware) offer additional security and are updated daily.
- DNS Encryption: Keep your browsing activity secure by encrypting DNS requests using trusted DNS services like Quad9.
- Rule Statistics: See how often rules have been applied, and quickly find rules that are unused
- Automatic Profile Switching: Connect to a new Wi-Fi network, and Little Snitch will automatically switch to the appropriate profile.
- Identifying Applications: Applications are identified based on their cryptographic code signature, making rules immune to apps being renamed or moved.
- Malware Detection: Detect network-related activity by viruses, trojans, and other malware, enhancing security
