So everyone is talking about Firewall, personal Firewalls and so on, right? Even if you read only few news on the internet or watch them on TV you might have heard of viruses, worms etc. to read up on those check HERE. in conjunction with these news ,experienced people, or even unexperienced ones who want to be cool, keep talking things like “Well if their firewall would have worked , there would have been no problem” or ” All this just because he didn’t have a firewall”. Well in this article we will try to describe in normal terms, with simple examples, what firewalls are and how they work. Basically trying to de-mystify the unknown.

First lets start with a simple example, think of a firewall like a doorman , a bouncer, at a nightclub. He basically has almost complete control over the people that go into the club and that come out. On big and important Club he might even control what people can take into the club, but more on that later.

Now, a firewall functions the same way that bouncer does. Just that instead of a club and people, a firewall controls what “internet or network traffic” goes into your network (Firewall) or computer (personal Firewall). A lot of computers running Windows, Linux or even Mac OS X have services running in order to talk to other computers in a network. A lot of these services are turned on by default and the Operating System might stop from working if you turn them all off (want to read more on operating systems and services? click HERE). Now attackers, also known as hackers, crackers or even viruses and worms, use these points of entry to try and gain access to your computer or network. A firewall helps your block ANYTHING that isnt allowed in. You might want to have your own webserver in your office, so you allow on your firewall that the outside world is allowed to access the webserver over http only. That way nothing else is accessible.
In the following graphic you will see how an innocent user is accessing a public webserver (the green lines, the request hits the firewall and the firewall allows it then to go to the webserver, and the traffic from the webserver back in) while some attackers try to access the innocent man’s machine (the red lines, see how the firewall blocks the traffic from actually going forward to the innocent user’s machine?). That is how essentially a firewall works.

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