What Does It Mean: Firewall

Despite its name, the word wall really is not a good way to describe a firewall unless you have the firewall set to block everything, good, bad, and indifferent. In that case it really would be a wall, but this also means no internet which means you can't read your favorite anti-malware blog. : (

A better way to think of it would be like a guard station, the guard checks all the internet and network traffic that comes in and goes out of your computer. And if anything shows up sketchy, it stops it until it knows what to do either by preset rules, or by telling you that something going on and asking you what you want to do. If you tell the firewall to block it, it will block the traffic and stop the network or internet connection. Some advanced firewalls can also think for themselves and decide to allow or block the traffic depending on how it looks.

There are three kinds of firewalls: There are inbound only firewalls which only scan inbound traffic. There are outbound firewalls which only scan outbound traffic, and there are firewalls that do both.

Firewalls are often included with high end antivirus software but they can also be standalone programs with just the firewall included.

Firewalls are used to block malware coming from the network. It also blocks programs from connecting to the internet if you do not want them to.

I would have to say that my favorite type of firewall is one that thinks for itself and is inbound and outbound. The ideal firewall should think for itself, because you do not want to be bothered with making all of the decisions. Why? Because an alert saying "something.exe is trying to connect to the internet. Allow or Deny?" is not very helpful to those that don't know a whole lot about computers. And if you deny everything, that again means no internet which again means you can't read your favorite anti-malware blog.

I hope that this post helps explain what a firewall is and what it does. If you have a question, comment, or you want to tell me how awesome I am, be sure to leave a comment in the box below. It's FREE and always will be.