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Firewall

The firewall essentially serves as a protective wall between your computer and the rest of your network, stopping attackers from stealing or damaging your data or gaining access to your devices. However, it’s important to remember that a firewall can be hacked too, so you’ll need to maintain it properly.

Firewalls can protect against a wide range of attacks and threats, including malware, ransomware, brute force attacks, hacking, and data loss. Firewalls are able to do this by monitoring data and activity in your networks and determining whether an entity is malicious or not. If the device is deemed to be malicious, the firewall will block communication with it and prevent it from being used as a portal into your private information.

There are many different types of firewalls, with each one incorporating unique methods of filtering and operation. The most basic firewalls use packet filters to examine data packages and determine whether they should be permitted or denied entry into a network based on the source and destination IP address. This method of filtering is simple and straightforward but leaves the door open to a couple of vulnerabilities.

Other more advanced firewalls utilize a state table to track and record the history of incoming data packets. By evaluating the past interactions of the firewall with various data packets, this firewall can then make decisions on how to filter future traffic based on its own history and experiences. These are known as stateful inspection firewalls and are a more secure method of protection than the simpler packet filtering.