Ensure your firewall is up and running (check in Control Panel/Security in Windows or System Preferences/Security on a Mac).What now?Ī firewall, if implemented correctly, can essentially make your computer or business network invisible to the ‘internet bad guys’. And it is very important to remember that the firewall cannot protect your computer or network from computer viruses that come from infected media – an infected program on a USB flash drive, for example. Various anti-viruses are used for these purposes.
This all sounds great, of course, but it’s important to remember that a firewall cannot scan the system for malware or perform actions with virus-infected files. Most firewalls also include a reporting mechanism of some kind – logging external and internal network attempts to penetrate the system. For a personal computer this may be relatively straightforward, but setting up the rules for a larger business, with a number of servers, users and/or departments, can be far more complicated. A large part of setting up a firewall can be configuring these rules. Generally the rules are designed to let the ‘good’ traffic through (that important email you’ve been waiting for! that video of dogs home alone you’ve been told about!), while keeping the ‘bad’ traffic out (hackers! malware!). The job of a firewall is to enforce rules about what network traffic can enter or leave your personal computer or company network. So what does the firewall do (and not do)? The firewall – either a piece or software (or hardware, in the form of an external unit) – filters all network traffic between the ‘inside’ (safe) and the ‘outside’ (likely not safe!). Using this as an analogy, a computer firewall is used to protect one (trusted) part of a computer network – generally your home computer or your business network – from another (less-trusted) part – ie the internet or a wide area network (WAN) such as across a university or across government departments.
In building construction, a firewall is used to protect one part of a building from a fire in another. But do we all understand what it means? What exactly is a firewall? And when a word has been kicking around for some thirty years, we’re pretty much all familiar with it. When it comes to computer tech-speak, the term ‘firewall’ is old-school – it was first applied to computer technology in the early 1990s.
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