macOS Sequoia causes problems with security tools and browsers

Apple officially launched macOS Sequoia on Monday, making the new operating system finally available to the general public. While the operating system brings a number of improvements and features, such as Apple Intelligence, the update appears to have caused issues and concerns for some security-related products and apps.

According to Thursday’s report TechCrunchmacOS Sequoia has impacted the functioning of various security tools developed by CrowdStrike and SentinelOne, among others.

The report cites recent social media posts from various security researchers and Reddit posts from affected users. Messages from software support accounts in the Slack chat room for Mac administrators, warning users about the issues with macOS Sequoia, are also mentioned in Thursday’s report.

While the report says the cause of the issue is unclear, it appears to be a network or firewall issue. In a Slack chat for Mac administrators, a CrowdStrike sales engineer said that there are “quite a few changes happening in the networking stack” and that CrowdStrike support for macOS Sequoia will be delayed due to the changes in macOS.

The same CrowdStrike sales engineer also said that the company is “tracking similar issues with other vendors” and that “they have feedback and a case with Apple.” CrowdStrike is waiting for Apple to fix the issue with a future macOS Sequoia update.

In the same Mac Slack channel, the SentinelOne support account also mentioned the issues with macOS Sequoia and urged users not to update their operating systems. ESET also warned its users about the networking issue in macOS Sequoia, urging users to update their ESET software to the latest version that is compatible with macOS Sequoia.

While the issues in macOS Sequoia have been noticed by security software companies, similar problems have also been experienced by individual security researchers.

Two such security researchers, Will Dormann and Waclaw Jacek, reported issues related to the firewall and DNS service in macOS Sequoia.

Will Dormann told Mastodon that he’s having issues with DNS and the macOS Sequoia firewall. According to the researcher, blocking incoming connections in the macOS Sequoia firewall can also block responses to DNS requests, causing issues. “Depending on how your firewall is configured, stupid things like DNS may stop working for some apps,” the researcher wrote.

Dormann also noted a seemingly related issue affecting Chrome and Chromium browsers on macOS Sequoia. Blocking incoming connections for Google Chrome in the macOS firewall causes large downloads to stop.

Apple released macOS Sequoia on September 16, along with iOS 18 and iPad OS.

Similarly, Reddit users have reported issues with the Firefox web browser on macOS Sequoia. One Reddit user had trouble changing firewall settings on macOS Sequoia to allow incoming connections to Firefox, while others provided potential workarounds and solutions.

There are workarounds for these firewall issues, which essentially involve “punching holes in your firewall,” as Will Dormann put it in his Mastodon posts. “Which is clearly not as secure as having a working firewall, but we’re at Apple’s mercy here,” Dormann wrote.

Waclaw Jacek, another security researcher, seems to confirm the claims of firewall issues. The researcher said in a blog post that the macOS Sequoia firewall can sometimes start blocking access to web browsing.

It’s important to note that Apple only made macOS Sequoia available to the general public on September 16. Since it’s still early in the operating system’s release cycle, there’s always a risk that there will be unpatched bugs or issues that Apple will fix in future updates.

If you have experienced similar issues on macOS Sequoia with third-party products and apps described here, Apple Insider recommends following the instructions provided by the software developers and customer support teams. For some users, this may mean sticking with macOS Sonoma for now.