“Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski revealed he was joining Apple earlier this month, and now it turns out his Mac security app, Little Flocker, has gone awol because it’s joining F-Secure,” Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch.
“The security firm said today it has acquired the behavioral based analysis app for Macs and macOS, which monitors apps that attempt to access confidential files and system resources to flag up and block malware. It also detects and blocks Mac ransomware,” Lomas reports. “The acquisition price for Little Flocker has not been disclosed.”
Lomas reports, “F-Secure said Little Flocker will be built into a new product it’s releasing, called Xfence, which will offer ‘advanced behavioural Mac protection for both corporate and consumer customers’ — vs the traditional signature-based approach for detecting Mac malware that it argues can’t pick up on ‘modern targeted attacks.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Little Flocker is a good app. Hopefully, this is good news for users of the app.
SEE ALSO:
Antivirus software won’t save your Mac from future malware, but a variety of other protective software could prevent incursions – March 29, 2017
Apple hires security guru Jonathan Zdziarski – March 14, 2017
And now for some utter confusion:
The Little Flocker site itself is effectively down. You can’t download from there.
However: Little Flocker is open source. It is branched open source. It has two GitHub sites where you can download it if you dare to compile it yourself:
https://github.com/wildatheart/littleflocker
https://github.com/Thireus/littleflocker
So what exactly now happens to the open source projects? And how does anyone ‘buy’ an open source project? If bought, which branch was bought? Were both branches bought? If so, then why are they still available?
I promised confusion.
mother flockers.
Oh and don’t doubt I’m not confused as well!
Correction: There are nine branches of Little Flocker. *slapping*self* 💥🖐
This is the source limb:
https://github.com/0xe1a00000/littleflocker
Here is the Member tree showing all the branches off the source limb:
https://github.com/0xe1a00000/littleflocker/network/members
Nine total. So humph. (o_O)
i tried it.. uninstalled after a week
it was way too intrusive and chatty to be useful at all.
and it wouldn’t even remember rules I had previously set.
I bought it. Deleted it after a few weeks. Couldn’t get anything done with it constantly interrupting pop ups. Even updating your rules or disabling it had far too many dialogue boxes.