Leopard firewall disabled by default

Is your Leopard firewall switched on?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7071017.stm

"A test of Leopard revealed that installing it led to the firewall on a Mac being turned off and its default setting changed to leave it disabled.... ....

He also found that even when the firewall was re-activated it did not let users know about all the potentially vulnerable processes running on that machine. .....

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, said: "Year after year, Macs continue to have these potential security problems.

"However, in practice they just don't seem to become real-world problems," he added. "The old wisdom still stands: if you want to avoid viruses and worms, get a Mac." "


Just thought it might be of interest, personally I'd want my firewall switched on and fully functioning on my mac. That way you can stop anything that is legitimately on your computer accessing the internet. I get most programs to ask permission prior to accessing the internet just because by automatically downloading updates they soon eat a hole in my monthly net use quota!

Has anyone found that their firewalls are disabled by default in Leopard? or could this just be a small minority which has been picked up on.

 

It is this way in TIger as well I believe. I do not understand why Apple does not enable them default. If you have not enabled yours do it. Even if you have a router at home, most of us use WiFi hotspots and you will want a firewall there.

 

I can confirm that Tiger is this way (I just did a clean install). I was a bit bewildered when I saw it.

 

It's this way in Tiger too. No clue why, but I guess that's some decision Apple made.

Incidentally, the firewall in OS X only blocks incoming traffic anyway doesn't it?

 

Well, some firewall is better than no firewall.

 

I guess, and that was the stance taken by Microsoft when it added its firewall to Windows XP SP2 I suppose.

Still, even though Windows has more need of it, there are at least 3rd party software options available - and some of them quite good.

There really isn't a decent security market for OS X yet though - and really a lack of a strong firewall and antivirus product.

Hopefully, supply won't lag behind demand too much when all the viruses and trojans hit ><

Also, is it just me or is the firewall in Leopard a lot less customizable? Port forwarding is a nightmare at the very least, and the options you have for configuring general rules and specific rules are nearly nonexistent.

 

Did everyone just wake up and realize that it's been this way for years? I don't understand why Apple doesn't enable this out of the box, but this certainly isn't anything new.

 

I read somewhere that Apple just puts a pretty UI onto a standard Unix firewall app. There are 3rd party apps out there that will access the firewall app and allow the user to customize it to a greater degree.

 

I use a firewall called GlowWorm, I'm pretty new to mac ownership (I've used them for years but I'm feeling protective over my own lol).. anyway... I'm not sure if it's me but I have it set to show the menu bar icon when it's running and for it to start when I boot up, but, when I boot up the icon isn't showing. Is there a way to see all the running processes on a mac a bit like task manager on a pc? then I can check to see if it's behaving itself!

 

Activity Monitor. Applications --> Utilities.

 

thanks for that!

and phew Glowworm is at least running in the background even if the menubar icon isn't working properly!

 

It's disabled by default (I would reckon) because it does cause problems with some things, and Apple wants everyone to have that happy feel goody just-works experience. It's turned off by default on Tiger as well, and at least the Tiger firewall has no outbound traffic filtering. I'd assume this is the same for Leopard.

 

Obviously, they leave it off by default for compatibility. The same reason MS left Windows' off until SP2 when they had too.

Turn it on, especially if you use it places outside your home.