Users with machines that had the firewall turned on also saw their firewall turned off after Leopard was installed. After a Leopard upgrade, the firewall is set to the first, 'Allow all.' which means, in fact, that the firewall is switched off. Other settings let users switch on the stealth mode, which is supposed to cloak all ports on the Mac, preventing attackers from even 'seeing' the machine when scanning the Internet for open ports and probing for potential victims. * Set access for specific services and applications The firewall in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard uses a bare-bones interface - earlier this week, Mogull called it 'so simple as to be nearly useless' - that offers users three options: I was originally pretty bullish on Leopard's security, and I still am on the concepts, but the implementation makes most of its advances ineffective or unusable.' 'This firewall is a mess,' Rich Mogull, a security consultant and former Gartner analyst, said after spending two days digging into the new firewall's capabilities. Leopard's firewall is confusing, inconsistent, switched off by default, and incompatible with some applications, a security researcher said Friday after analyzing the new security tool.
