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A firewall is a hardware device or software application that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic, blocking suspicious and malicious data from entering your organization. Firewalls work by inspecting each incoming and outgoing data packet, comparing them to pre-defined security rules set up by your organization. This information is stored in logs and real-time alerts may be generated for serious threats.

By blocking harmful connections, your firewall protects against malware attacks such as phishing emails that can deliver viruses, denial of service attacks that flood servers with unanswerable requests, and macros that automatically copy themselves across computers to spread infection. It can also prevent hacker attempts to remotely login and take control of your computer or to steal confidential information.

There are different types of firewalls: Packet filtering: examines each packet of data based on its unique characteristics and compares them to filters that determine whether it is a threat. This is the most common type of firewall and it works by checking each incoming data packet for specific information like where it came from, where it is going, and what the packet contains.

Proxy service firewalls act as a go-between positioned between your computer and the source or destination of the data, which makes them a popular choice to help reduce security risks from outside an organization. They provide more protection than a packet filtering firewall and can be configured to look for things like cookies, which are small pieces of information that store data. Some firewalls also use stateful inspection, a more sophisticated approach that looks at the entire context of a connection and can determine if it’s safe or not by evaluating where a packet came from, where it is heading to, what its contents are, and its overall behavior.