subject: The Basics of Firewall Protection by Jared [print this page] The Basics of Firewall Protection by Jared
How Firewall's Work
Firewalls are built and programmed to protect your PC from threats outside of your network, these firewalls can come in several different types. Both hardware and software firewalls are very useful and have benefits on both sides.
What a firewall does is act like a filter and strains out all the bad or unwanted traffic that comes into contact with your PC from the outside. With a firewall you can setup the filters to setup anything that you want to filter, from external networks to restrict access to individual ports to ensure there is not a way to access your system without your authorization.
If you have a piece of data that comes to your machine and it is flagged by your firewall filters then the system will deny all information to the PC and dump the packets or send them away if they are requesting information. Different types of systems can block IP addresses or even hide your IP address so that it is invisible to anyone else on the internet.
Basics of the Firewall
Proxy servers - Proxy servers can do 2 different things, they can route traffic from a PC to another location and back again, this way you can access a site almost anonymously.
Filtering of Packets - Filtering of packets is one of the oldest methods for a firewall to sort out traffic and block traffic that is not wanted. A hardware of software firewall will monitor all the ports on your machine and will block traffic that is not needed or block traffic or access depending on filters that you setup on your firewall.
Data (stateful) inspection -
In the stateful inspection will examine the data that comes across via the internet and back to you while checking the packets for malicious information
Firewall Basics and Your Security
Hackers can cause very bad damage to your system, here are a few different types of issues that they can cause.
OS Bugs - There are some applications and operating systems that have bugs that can be exploited, and cause a system to give out remote access and remote login privileges.
E-mail bombers - Email bombs are a single message that are usually received by outlook or another similar program that would then pump out up to 100's of emails at a time that would eventually lock up your computer.
DoS attacks - Denial of Service attacks, your one computer can be part of a huge network that would be used to infiltrate other machines and even be part of a mass attack that would bring down servers and websites all at once.
If you would like to turn on the firewall in Windows XP (or off!) then you can go to your start button and click on the Control Panel link, once that is open if you are in Classic view then you will be able to click on the Windows Firewall and then it will give you the ability to turn the Firewall off and on.
If you are in a Linux box such as redhat then you would simply type "iptables stop" to stop the firewall or "iptables start" to restart the firewall services.
No matter what kind of Firewall or what you do to filter your firewall from attacks, hackers will always find ways to bypass firewalls and attack your system. There is nothing that you can do to be perfectly safe when connected to the internet but you can be prepared for the worst and hopefully deter a attacker to find a harder target.
Author - Vivek Gite
Page Title -How to disable the iptables firewall in Linux
Site Title - Cyberciti
Author - Microsoft Corporation
Page Title -Microsoft Support
Site Title - Microsoft Support Website
Author - Kenneth Ingham/Stephanie Forrest
Page Title -A History and Survey of Network Firewalls
