Little Snitch 4 is a fantastic piece of software that’s really matured over the years to the point where now it’s made the difficult nature of real time alerting and realtime traffic and networking rules really easy to do, it’s not cheap at forty euros but it’s certainly worth every penny when it comes to reducing anxiety.
being on top of the potential of malware, droppers, viruses and getting roped into some bot network, it gives me the peace of mind that I know what’s going on with my mac after my routers basic protections and when you have nasty CPU bugs like spectre and meltdown around anything additional makes the difference.
Every start of the year I always do this when I’m upgrading software and hardware, making sure I have the latest version, really paying money up front to have the latest piece of software, even hardware if I can afford it means that I don’t have to worry about upgrading throughout the year.
It can give me some good active computing runway before I have to do system admin again, that being said being on top of your daily networking comms is a must, think of it like insurance that you can do the things you need to do on a daily basis while minimising the downtime of being a computer user.
If you are a Mac user that get’s even a little bit paranoid about software you have downloaded or feel your computer is running a little slow, have crypto wallets on your machine or run any kind of torrent software you certainly need some kind of traffic management and router tools even if you are using public wifi with a vpn, trust me, it’s the number one space that drive by script kiddies are exploring these days and it’s accelerated over the last year alone what with KRACK and these CPU bugs.
Invest the money in these tools, learn how they work, it can save you valuable setup time while using your computer actively on a daily basis and less downtime means you can get more down in a safer environment.
