Today, even an inexperienced computer user knows that the World Wide Web is full of all sorts of threats. Viruses and trojans are the first to come to mind, but we must not forget about the existence of network attacks and other “noise” that can cause you a lot of problems.
Firewall is called to help cope with these phenomena. What is it and how is it so useful?
Historical excursion
It so happened that initially this term arose among professional firefighters. They called the "firewall" or the "Wall of Fire" a streak of fire, which was directed towards the center of fire.
When two sources of flame collided, they mutually extinguished each other. But this is not that Firewall. What is it, judging from the perspective of a computer user?
Theoretical background
This is a special software or hardware complex that filters all network traffic, determining malicious activity using the set of rules embedded in it. In addition, heuristic analyzers and sandbox systems are used to identify and prevent potentially malicious programs.
Simply put
If you translate all of the above into more familiar formulations, then Firewall (what we already learned) is a special program that controls other applications on the computer.
But it does not control it as an antivirus would do, but from the standpoint of banning or allowing access to the network. This is the firewall. What is this if we talk about an ordinary PC user who is not interested in all this behavior of programs?
What is it for?
This attitude to one’s own security is fraught with problems. Even if you are sure that stealing from your computer is still nothing, that malicious files are completely uninteresting for your malicious files, then this is not entirely true.
Do you have a page on social networks? And the phone number that you regularly enter to confirm something? So, all this data in the modern "shadow" market has some value. So the profit can be obtained from any nonchalant user.
What are they
In general, today the market for antivirus and other security software is a full house: even those companies that had not done anything similar before took up its production. Of course, when choosing, you should focus only on the products of reputable and reputable companies.
They are distributed both bundled with the OS, and separately. The latter are divided into independent software products (Outpost) and an “appendage” to antivirus software. A vivid example is Norton Internet Security, Kaspersky Internet Security and other "guards".
If you use the operating system from one recognizable corporation from Redmond, then you will hardly need to configure Firewall. Windows has built-in protection of this class, and in the latest versions of the OS its effectiveness has greatly increased.
As a rule, built-in rule sets are enough to reflect most of the not too serious threats. If you install software from a third-party manufacturer, then this firewall is automatically turned off.
But it happens that after the removal of some antivirus or other similar program, the built-in protection does not turn on automatically. So where is the firewall, which would not hurt to re-commission? You need to look for it in the control panel, where it is called "Windows Firewall."