Firewall – The First Line of Defense Against Cyber Attacks
Firewall is the first line of defense against cybersecurity threats that attack networks and users, including hacking, malware, identity theft, and more. Firewalls are an essential tool for every network, large and small, as they constantly monitor the traffic on the networks to vet out potential threats and protect against them.
The earliest firewalls were packet filtering firewalls that monitored the contents of data packets before they entered the network. This vetting was critical for a business’s data and networks to be safe from unauthorized entry into the internal systems. These packet filtering firewalls were the precursors to stateful inspection firewalls, which can track a connection’s history and make decisions about the current traffic based on its past interactions.
More advanced firewalls, such as next-generation firewalls (NGFW), incorporate additional features to provide more complete protection against modern attacks. These features can include combining traditional firewall capabilities with application awareness and an intrusion prevention system (IPS). This helps to better understand what each type of security protocol is doing in order to better block any unwanted applications.
Network administrators need to keep their firewalls updated with the latest patches and threat intelligence from vendors to ensure that they are protecting their networks from the most recent cyber attacks. They also need to be proactive about keeping the firewall rules clean of any redundancies, duplicates or unnecessary elements that could cause the guidelines to be confusing and less effective at blocking the most dangerous threats.