Firewall: what is it and what is it for?

Today even an inexperienced computer user knows that the World Wide Web is full of all kinds of threats. The first to come to mind are viruses and Trojans, but you can not forget about the existence of network attacks and other "noise", which can give you a lot of problems.

Help to cope with these phenomena called Firewall. What is it and why is it so useful?

Historical digression

It so happened that originally this term arose in the environment of professional firefighters. "Firewall" or "Fiery Wall" they called a strip of fire, which was directed towards the source of the fire.

When the two sources of the flame collided, they mutually extinguished each other. But this is not the Firewall. What is it, judging from the position of the user of the computer?

Theoretical justification

This is a special software or hardware complex that filters all network traffic, identifying malicious activity with the help of a set of rules embedded in it. In addition, heuristic analyzers and "sandbox" systems are used to detect and prevent potentially malicious programs.

If to speak easier

If we translate all of the above into more familiar formulations, Firewall (which we have already learned) is a special program that controls other applications on the computer.

But it controls not how the antivirus does, but from the standpoint of prohibiting or allowing access to the network. This is the Firewall. What is it, if to speak about the ordinary user of the PC, to whom all this behavior of the programs is not interesting at all?

What is it for?

This attitude to their own security is fraught with problems. Even if you are sure that stealing from your computer is still nothing, that the evil hackers are completely uninteresting your files, then all this is not entirely true.

Do you have a page in social networks? And the phone number you regularly enter to confirm anything? So, all these data on the modern "shadow" market have some value. So the profit can be obtained from any careless user.

What are they like?

In general, in the market of anti-virus and other protective software to date, a full house: for its production took even those companies that had not done anything similar before. Of course, that when choosing one should focus only on the products of respected and reputable firms.

They are distributed as a bundled with the OS, and separately. The latter are divided into independent software products (Outpost) and an "appendage" to the antivirus. A vivid example is Norton Internet Security, Kaspersky Internet Security and other "guards".

If you use the operating system from one recognized corporation from Redmond, then you probably do not need to configure the Firewall. Windows has built-in protection of this class, and in the latest versions of OS its effectiveness has greatly increased.

As a rule, built-in sets of rules are enough to reflect most of the not too serious threats. If you put the software from a third-party manufacturer, then this firewall is automatically turned off.

But it happens that after removing an antivirus or another similar program, the built-in protection does not turn on automatically. So where is the Firewall, which would not stop reintroducing? You need to search for it in the control panel, where it is called "Windows Firewall".