What is a Firewall

Since you are rea­ding this article, I would ven­ture a guess that you have got­ten con­nec­ted to the Inter­net.  If you aren’t, please let me know your secrets.

Accor­ding to a Pew sur­vey post in June of this year, 63% of all Ame­ri­can hou­seholds have broad­band con­nec­tions at home.  This means that 2/3rds of all Ame­ri­can homes have always on access to the Inter­net.  Now that is great for ease and ins­tant avai­la­bi­lity of the web, it also means your com­pu­ter is sit­ting out there for the world to see and try and get into.

Now, I am not trying to imply that every user of the Inter­net is trying to hack every other user, but a lot of orga­ni­zed cri­mi­nal groups, as well as bored inte­lli­gent peo­ple are trying to get into your com­pu­ter to get your per­so­nal infor­ma­tion, user your com­pu­ter to send spam, infect other peo­ple, etc.

Besi­des a good upda­ted Anti­vi­rus uti­lity, what else can I do?

Fire­walls.

What are fire­walls you are won­de­ring.  Think of it as a very sturdy brick wall that blocks all views in and out.  That is the most secu­red you pos­sibly can be.  The model for most fire­walls is known as deny by rule, allow by excep­tion.  What does that mean for you, unless you spe­ci­fi­cally say I want to allow this ser­vice (Email, Web Brow­sing, FTP, what have you) it will be blocked.

Now fire­walls come in two types: Soft­ware (Nor­ton Inter­net Secu­rity, Comodo, McA­fee Fire­wall, as well as many others) and “Hard­ware”.  The hard­ware types are nor­mally found in modern Broad­band routers.

Soft­ware Fire­walls.
Now most win­dows users, and I can’t speak for Mac or Unix so don’t flame me for that, have a fire­wall already built in and ena­bled by default.  Do I think you should rely on that?  No.  There are many add on appli­ca­tions, some I lis­ted above, I think do a bet­ter job, but not as easily con­fi­gu­red, but they are coming a long way from where they were.

Now the thing to remem­ber about most soft­ware fire­walls, they are lear­ning fire­walls, they will ask you if a new pro­gram is attemp­ting to con­nect to the Inter­net and prompt you to allow or not.  If you did not ins­tall a new pro­gram or you do not recog­nize the con­nec­tion, deny.

I am not going to get into a review right now, but com­ments and recom­men­da­tions are wel­co­med and encou­ra­ged.  But for my per­so­nal use, I have Comodo ins­ta­lled now.

Hard­ware Fire­walls:
For the most part you will not even get into the fire­wall con­trols on your rou­ter, other then to ena­ble them.  You have to know a bit of infor­ma­tion to make these modi­fi­ca­tions.  You will want to know which IP address of your local com­pu­ters, which port and if the port is TCP or UDP.  For the ave­rage user, it’s not worth the work, but the options are there.

So you have ins­ta­lled and con­fi­gu­red your fire­wall, now what?  Well, if you are like me, you will want to run some tests, just to give you the warm fuz­zies.  I use a few sites and I am sure there are many, many more out there.  The sites I use are: Shield’s Up and AuditMyPc.