Snitch On The Snitchers With Little Snitch

One day I was working on a report on my laptop. Across the room I could see the wireless router and all sorts of activity (little green lights made blink blink). Normally, that wouldn’t bother me except I was NOT browsing at the time and my email application (Apple’s Mail.app) wasn’t even open.

Who was using my Internet connection? It wasn’t me (at least, that’s what I thought at the time). Was it a neighbor connecting to my Airport link? Nope. I had password security in place to prevent that.

What was using the Airport Internet connection?

It turns out that it was, sorry to say, me. Except I wasn’t doing anything at the time.

With some investigation I found out that about half a dozen applications that I use regularly were “phone home” apps; from time to time they’d start an executable (curl or something else that resides quietly in Mac’s unix underpinnings), connect to the Internet and send/receive information.

Yikes. I didn’t authorize that, for sure.

A little digging around in the Activities Monitor pointed out a number of little applications and some that could be identified by name.

A little more digging around at VersionTracker and I found a neat application that “snitches” on the applications that phone home.

It’s called Little Snitch from Objective Development.