Yesterday Apple announced that the long-awaited Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) operating system would be available on October 26. Here at Open Door Networks we have been evaluating various pre-release versions of Leopard for a year now, and it’s a good thing we have! Leopard adds a number of new, highly-useful Internet-based features (and changes a number of others), but of course each of these features is accompanied with its own set of security issues.

Stay tuned to this blog, and our Web site, for details of updates to our security book and products for Leopard. For now, to whet your appetite and to get you thinking about what’s going to be involved, here’s a list of some of the bigger Leopard Internet security features/issues:

1. • Two completely different flavors of remote Screen Sharing are built-in (Finder-based and iChat-based), each letting anyone running Leopard (and in some cases other software) take full control of your Mac over the Internet.
   

2. • “Back to My Mac” lets anyone who has access to your .Mac account find and access many of your Mac’s sharing services over the Internet, including Screen and File Sharing.
   

3. • Enhanced Parental Controls let you limit and monitor all your Macs’ Internet usage remotely.
   

4. • A new, application-based “built in” firewall seems to raise more issues than it fixes.
   

5. • Various sharing services have been renamed, combined, split, and/or enhanced. In particular File Sharing has a whole set of new features.