What Are Firewalls and How Do They Work?
Firewalls are the guardians of our digital gates, letting in only safe traffic and keeping out malware. They work by examining all data packets that come into or go out of devices and comparing them to security rules that you define to determine if a packet should be allowed in or out. They also record any suspicious or malicious activity in real-time.
Typically, firewalls are either hardware or software and you probably have one or more in place already. You’ll find them in the router that brings internet service into your home, office or business, as well as on each computer you use in your network. They’re even built into many operating systems, such as macOS and Windows.
As different generations of firewall technology have evolved, so too have the types of threats they protect against. Firewalls filter traffic based on rules that may be based on IP addresses, protocols, ports or other packet-level details. More advanced firewalls, such as stateful inspection and fourth-generation NGFW (Next-Generation Firewall) technologies, track the state of active connections to evaluate traffic in context. This helps them detect more complex or stealthy attacks that attempt to fool or hide behind protocol behavior.
User ID enables firewall rules to be crafted based on a user’s identity, rather than just their IP address. This makes it easier to allow or block traffic based on who is trying to access a network resource, regardless of the source or destination device.