A firewall is a pre-installed network security tool that is used to modify, monitor, permit, and control inbound (incoming) and outbound(outgoing) movements or connections within a network. A firewall is a necessary or rather very important security feature that helps protect computers against malware attacks and unsolicited and malicious network traffic.
Firewalls barricades traffic between your computer and the outside such as the internet. Since it comes with your system by default, there is no need to install it before it could render its basic operations. It is left for you to check in your firewall defender settings to configure it or modify its default settings to suit your security preferences.
Categories of Firewall
Software firewalls are firewalls that are installed in an Operating system to filter incoming and outgoing network traffic and packets.
Hardware firewalls are third-party firewalls. Due to the growing trend of cybercrime, the software layer of the firewall may not be able to give adequate protection to the computer system and some of the services it renders or receives. A third-party firewall is to serve a particular application, cloud-based needs, etc.
Types of Firewall
- Proxy firewall Also known as application-level gateways. The Proxy firewall middles between the internal network and the external client. Preventing a connection to be established between the two packets until the authenticity of the incoming connection request is duly verified and inversely, covering up the IP and network identity when the internal network establishes a connection with the outside network.
- Packet Filtering Firewalls Packet filtering firewalls are fast, cheap, and effective. The oldest, fast and affordable firewall that renders basic security services. Packet-filtering firewalls control and monitors the in and outflow of data packets within a network. Through its pre-determined settings, it checks, allows, or blocks the IP and port of the incoming and the destination of the out-going
- Stateful Inspection Firewalls This is a third-party firewall that is used to enforce additional security. this type of firewall inspects the legitimacy of the source and destination IP and Ports numbers and connection sessions; creates security rules through the state table.
Essentials of Firewalls
Prevents unauthorized remote access from unrecognized sources into your operating system.
It allows you to monitor the packets your system receives as it ensures they are coming from trusted sources.
Blocking of remote-access malware and hackers and unruly contents that could come from some websites
A firewall helps modify your security to know those IPs you can give access to as it protects you from spies.