The Importance Of Firewalls

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Firewalls are computer security systems that protect your office/home PCs or your network from intruders, hackers & mall functions and from offensive software that may come to reside on your systems or from prying hackers. Firewalls are software programs or hardware devices that filter the traffic that flows into you PC or your network through a internet connection.They sift through the data flow & block that which they deem (based on how & for what you have tuned the firewall) harmful to your network or computer system. Firewalls provide you with the necessary safety and protection an can offer the security that makes you less vulnerable and also protect your data from being compromised or your computers being taken hostage. …show more content…

Once you know what your network will be used for, you will have an idea of what to permit. Also, once a system administrator understands what they need to protect, they will have an idea of what to block. mail servers, DNS servers, FTP services, and databases. Each of these has separate functionality, and each of these has separate vulnerabilities. Once you have decided who should receive what type of traffic and what types should be blocked, you can administer this through the firewall.

They can do this through a variety of means, including

. Network Address Translation (NAT)

. Basic Packet Filtering

. Stateful packet Filtering • …show more content…

Advanced firewalls employ stateful packet filtering to prevent several types of undesired communications. Should a packet come from outside the network, in an attempt to pretend that it is a response to a message from inside the network, the firewall will have no record of it 's being requested and can discard it, blocking access. As many communications will be transferred to high ports, above 1023, stateful inspection will enable the system to determine which sets of high communications are permissible and which should be

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