Protect Your Home PC With a Free Firewall

Imagine if someone broke into your house and stole your computer or laptop. While the violation of a break in and losing irreplaceable home movies and pictures has a great emotional cost and replacing those systems has a real monetary cost, what about the data on that hard drive? Is your tax information worth something to an identity thief? What about your banking, shopping and other account information? With a physical break-in there is a chance that person will be caught and your computer returned. An electronic break-in however rarely results in arrests and once your information is “in the wild” it is impossible to get back. Your 1^st (and often last) line of defense against this type of incident is a firewall to protect your computer's data from would-be data thieves.

In firefighting, a firewall is a barrier established to prevent the spread of fire. Firewall as a component of a computer network can be implemented in any combination of software and hardware that filters all network traffic between a user computer, home or company network, and the Internet. In most general terms firewalls are network “bouncers” that allow specified traffic through specified doors or ports.

Firewalls insure this barrier by having all traffic from inside to outside and from outside to inside the network pass through it. Or in the case of a single PC network in and out of that PC. Then only authorized traffic, as defined by the security policy, is allowed to pass through it. The firewall itself is (hopefully) immune to penetration.

Most organizations place a firewall at the Internet entry point of their networks. The firewall provides a defense between a network and the Internet or between a network and any other network that could pose a threat.

By employing firewalls to control connectivity to these areas, an organization can prevent unauthorized access to the respective systems and resources within the more sensitive areas. Networks inside the firewall are referred to as trusted, whereas networks located outside the firewall are called untrusted. For example, one security policy a firewall might enforce is to allow all HTTP (Web) traffic to pass back and forth, but disallow FTP or Telnet requests either into or out of the protected network. Ideally, firewall protection should prevent access to networks inside the firewall by unauthorized users, and thus prevent protected networks and data files.

Small business firewall software is one method used to protect computers against hacker attacks and other Internet threats. Small business firewall software and hardware solutions are both designed to block unauthorized access to computers. Firewalls help prevent hackers from intercepting private data or planting Trojan horses or other Internet threats on your networked computers.

To safeguard all your company's computers, however, each one must have a software firewall installed. A small business firewall software program is installed on each individual PC it's meant to protect. This can become expensive and difficult to maintain and support. In addition, small business firewall software may require each individual user to make decisions about allowing or denying a program's requested access to the Internet (which helps prevent malware from sending proprietary information from your computer over the Internet, among other things). Users without much computer or security experience may be uncomfortable handling the requests and alerts that small business firewall software presents to them. The Windows XP built in firewall software is simple and effective protection from inbound traffic. In order o control outbound traffic and for other features, consider a secondary product.

Hardware-based firewalls protect all the computers on your network. A hardware-based firewall is easier to maintain and administer than individual software firewalls. Many ISP provided systems have a hardware firewall already built in and pre-configured.

The ideal solution for small businesses is a hardware firewall integrated into a comprehensive security solution. In addition to a firewall, the solution should include virtual private network (VPN) support, antivirus, antispam, antispyware, content filtering, and other security technologies. At a minimum, you also need anti-virus and anti-spyware software to provide a reasonable level of security. You may also want software for email encryption, trojan detection and removal, cookie manager or cleaner, ad blocker, personal data privacy, and parental controls for content filtering.