This menubar app for OS X will notify you via Growl or Notifcation Center if any SSH, FTP, VNC, AFP, or Sudo authentication events occur. It's very useful if you're paranoid about people trying to hack into your computer. Or... if you simply like having information about people using your computer's resources. It's easily extensible in python, you can add modules that watch logfiles or processes and do whatever you want. You can even send them as push notiifcations to your iOS device using Prowl.

1. Download and run Security Growler.app
2. Run sudo easy_install gntp in Terminal to enable Growl support
   (otherwise it defaults to using Notification Center)

I was tired of not being able to find an app that would quell my paranoia about open ports, so I made one myself. Now I can relax whenever I'm in a seedy internet cafe or connected to free Boingo airport wifi because I know if anyone is trying to connect to my computer.

This app will notify you if any SSH, FTP, VNC, AFP, or Sudo auth events occur.

It does not increase your security in any way, it just notifies you who and when people are authenticated on your computer. It also notifies you whenever an apache error occurs (although you may want to turn this off if you develop locally, getting growl bubbles on every pageload is annoying).

Simply comment out these three lines in Security Growler.app/Contents/Resources/growler.py

if apache_event:
    print("[>] secnotify[%s]: %s" % (apache_event, apache_line))
    notify(content=apache_line, title=apache_event)

A related project is available for Linux users: PushAlotAuth, it uses the PushALot push-notification platform.

The menubar app is a simple wrapper for the python script, compiled using Platypus. Security Growler-dev.app is symlinked to run growler.py for development. Security Growler.app is packaged and uses it's prebuilt growler.py. To make changes to the app, change menubar.sh, and growler.py, and run Security Growler-dev.app to test your changes. Once you're done, submit a pull request.

The menubar app works by simply running growler.py (which writes to a log file), then cating the contents of /tmp/securitygrowlerevents.log and displaying them in the dropdown. See menubar.sh for more details.

==== Nick Sweeting 2014 -- MIT License