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Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

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354<br />

CHAPTER 20 LEOPARD NETWORKING<br />

Monitoring Network Traffic<br />

Raising the firewall is a good first step, but nothing beats basic situational awareness. If your<br />

computer was infected with malware and participating in zombienet denial-of-service attacks or<br />

sending out spam, would you know?<br />

I like to know what my computer is doing, which is why I love Activity Monitor, located in<br />

/Applications/Utilities. Activity Monitor lets you know what’s running and how much memory<br />

and CPU it’s taking up. It also lets you monitor when things are writing to disk or sending and<br />

receiving traffic over the network, as shown in Figure 20-4.<br />

Figure 20-4. Monitoring network traffic with Activity Monitor<br />

Activity Monitor has a convenient animated Dock icon, so even when the monitoring window<br />

is not open, I can keep an eye on packets traveling over the network. If I see a lot of activity<br />

and I’m not actively using the network, I want to know why.<br />

TIP A lot of root and system programs have arcane invocations that can make it hard to tell<br />

what a given program in Activity Monitor actually is. You can Google the program name, or<br />

you can look it up on such convenient lists as Amit Singh’s <strong>Mac</strong> <strong>OS</strong> X Hacking Tools: www.<br />

kernelthread.com/mac/osx/tools.html.<br />

If you want to take network monitoring to the next level, you need to check out Little<br />

Snitch, by Objective Development. Little Snitch complements your firewall by letting you know<br />

when applications try to send data from your machine.<br />

Why might an application send out packets? If it’s iChat or Mail or Safari, it probably has a<br />

legitimate reason. On the other hand, there are a lot of other reasons you might not be in total<br />

agreement with, such as phoning home with personal information the developer thinks it’s OK<br />

to take without asking.

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