The Computer Revolution/Security/Firewall

Many times we have head people saying “ I can’t get onto that website because of the firewall”. What does that mean? Most of the computers at home and in large corporations are protected by a firewall. It protects the computers from potential hackers. It protects you from all the threats that are trying to enter your computer. That is why it’s called firewall. It allows information to go through or it doesn’t allow the information to go through. For instance, in a large company there are hundreds of computers connected to the network. All these networks are in interests of hackers. If there is a hole that is not covered hackers would enter and exploit that hole. That’s when firewall comes in and protects. A company can have a large control of what is getting downloaded, what websites employees enter and how, even controlling what website are not to be entered at work. Suck treats that it protects us from are: macros, email bombs, spam, viruses etc. There are three levels of firewall protection. The best one to use is the highest level of security. It will block everything but it’s the best way to start and allow only the sites that you choose to come into your computer.

Security Devices
The Statefull firewall is one of the most common business security devices

Stateful Firewall -  The stateful Firewall in business allows for the most flexibility in providing secure Internet access. This type of firewall inspects the outgoing packets and retains the destination and source information of the packet in memory. The stateful firewall will then only authorize those sender and receiver packets to traverse the Network. One important aspect of the stateful firewall is that a Network administrator can define specific polices defining which type of packets would be allowed to traverse a business’s private network. These policies can be defined in relation to protocols and applications which the firewall refines the inspection of the session. 1 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=373120