A firewall for your network
Why installing a firewall for network? The global business world is spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year on acquiring and evolving their assets to digital. Figures say the rate is rapidly growing and will quickly reach 3 trillion dollars per year by 2025.
With digital assets at the core of most businesses, sound network infrastructure is key to avoiding nasty surprises while keeping your revenue stream high.
A firewall is a fundamental security measure that creates a barrier between your network of devices and the external network. In doing so, it protects you against external threats such as malware and hackers trying to gain access to your data and system.
Adopting one is ultimately the first quick win for your network to be safe.
What can a firewall do for your network safety?
Firewalls come with a set of perks and enhance your network health and security.
Find below a list of major benefits of adopting a firewall solution.
- Monitor data flow
Trojans and other malware silently sit on the back of your computer, exchanging data with malicious actors through your wi-fi. The first action a user can take is to monitor where the data goes and comes from and its volume, in real-time.
GlassWire is working on a brand new feature able to compare the single user data for each app with a benchmark average obtained from its user base.
This will highlight suspicious activity such as anomalies in the volumes of data exchanged, and let the user block the jeopardizing piece of software with a single click.
- Local access control
Adopting a firewall for the home network is the first-tier security line against cyber attacks. Monitoring wouldn’t be enough if not matched with the capability to control single app behaviors and secure your endpoint. A firewall should provide you with the ability to allow or deny your apps from exchanging data. Taking control over all the hosts and services that want to access your computer is underrated but is actually among the most powerful features in terms of security.
A firewall allows you to customize a rule set for content filtering, thus allowing you to lock down the internet connection against unwanted packets of data. The simplest yet the most effective anti-malware.
- Remote access control
Taking care of security is pretty straightforward when you own just a single computer or a local network. It’s indeed as simple as installing a firewall for the internal network and a malware detector. Things get way more complicated if you own remote-connected devices.
In fact, one of the best features a firewall can provide is the ability to track the apps and services running on a number of devices connected remotely. You could then block those services individually and have control over the data flows they exchange.
- Prevent virus attacks and hacking
Threats in the digital ecosystem are basically everywhere. Tuning your firewall for network security may prevent a virus from entering your computer and hackers from forcing your defenses. It may seem simplistic, but the very first line of defense comes from technology as simple as a filter, a firewall.
By only admitting the desired data, you could drastically improve your level of security. It’s no news that the concept of a firewall applies also to humans, where a person himself acts as a filter in disclosing certain information.
The 5 Types of Firewall
If every firewall has its own architecture, is important to highlight the 5 main technologies on which they build.
- Packet filtering firewall
This technology acts at the junction points between devices, such as modems and computers, and filters data packets according to certain rules. If a packet doesn’t pass the rules (IP address, packet type, port number, etc…) is simply blocked.
- Circuit-level gateway
The circuit-level gateway acts at the very beginning of a TCP connection, allowing only legitimate sessions. They filter out traffic that doesn’t respect established network protocols such as TCP handshakes and session initiation messages.
- Application-level gateway (aka proxy firewall)
An Application-level gateway constitutes the only entry and exit point between the network and the device. It filters data by a number of characteristics such as the service for which they are intended, the destination port, and the HTTP request string.
- Stateful inspection firewall
More complex technology is one of the so-called stateful inspection firewalls, not only matching each packet with a set of rules but also checking whether the packets are part of a certain network session or not.
If on the one hand, this is way more effective in terms of security, on the other hand, it requires more computational resources, resulting in less network performance.
- Next-generation firewall (NGFW)
Next-generation firewalls are powerful software leveraging a variety of deep packet inspection (DPI), antivirus, and malware filtering. Moreover, they validate the packets after being assembled over a web browsing session, filtering out packets that don’t constitute a legitimate HTML-formatted response.
New cybersecurity challenges
New habits like remote working and cyber threats raising at large pose new cyber security challenges. Working remotely from home with a company device, for example, creates a new vulnerability scenario, that a malicious actor could take advantage of.
A home network may easily constitute a vulnerable company entry point and this is the reason for an endpoint cybersecurity solution on both personal and company devices.
Adopting firewall software for the home network will result in better protection for personal and business computers.
