Re: [Littlesnitch-talk] Hacker/spyware or Panther?

[ZHMMY HARPER]

I've been demoing LittleSnitch on my laptop (G4 12"), and whenever I try to connect to my G5 to mount drives remotely, it says "Finder wants to connect to 254.246.96.138".

Now that IP address is not in my LAN ip pool, but I thought maybe this was some aspect of Airport or Panther that I didn't know about, and let it go. But today I denied connection, and my drive mounted anyway. And when I disconnected the G5 once after having allowed the connection, it said _2_ users were remotely connected, when (I thought) that just my laptop was connecting.

LittleSnitch Gives this info about the attempt:
Server: 254.246.96.138 (254.246.96.138)
Path: /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder

So, do I have somebody hacking into my machine, or spyware waiting for me to do a remote connection, or is this some aspect of Panther I just don't understand well enough?

I should mention that I have a Belkin 802.11g router with a firewall, and the two computers are connected to the network over Airport Extreme cards.

I can say that if this does turn out to be spyware, I'm gonna buy LittleSnitch and recommend it highly to all.

Thanks,
Ajanjigian

Well, I haven't had anything weird like that happen. I don't think LittleSnitch would actually keep hackers out. My understanding is that it prevents any software installed on your machine from using a built-in code to dial out to somewhere on internet, usually the producer of the software. Just that feature makes it a necessary utility to protect your privacy--you don't want a company having the ability to dig around in your files at will.

Your router firewall should prevent most intrusion I would think.