What is a firewall and how does it work?

As specialists in the installation of antivirus for businesses Today we're going to talk about the firewall.

It's a concept that stems from a structure designed to anticipate the "spread of fire," much like emergency exits in a fire. It safeguards the company's internal assets and only allows access to authorized personnel. The firewall creates a virtual environment around the company's network, acting as a security officer for incoming traffic.

As installers of antivirus for businesses We can tell you that there are primarily two types of firewalls: network-based and host-based. In the first case, the firewall is a specialized device that acts as a protective barrier around the entire company network. In the second case, the firewall acts as a security measure on a specific device, such as a laptop.

Although you can find many types of firewalls, such as personal firewalls (to act on individual system usage requirements), application layer firewalls (operates based on apps, controlling how they reach the Internet), gateway-level circuit firewalls (controls the establishment of TCP or UDP connections through security sessions) and application-level gateway firewalls (applied only to specific applications considered high-risk, such as FTP servers or P2P free information exchange servers)

How does it work?

As experts in antivirus for businesses We want you to know that the firewall distinguishes between allowed and dangerous or suspicious connections, using different procedures:

• Using IP addresses and other identification systems, to suspend any type of communication request that does not come from the internal network or the system itself, masking the sum of internal resources behind the IP address, so that no one can monitor them externally.
• Content filtering; Through a method of exclusion rules where the user has the final say, the firewall classifies content as problematic, suspicious, or unsafe, in addition to content that is at the user's discretion, to block access to those websites or entire servers as a precautionary measure.
• Anti-malware services; Some firewalls have built-in malware and virus definitions, provided by defensive programs, to help contain the spread of these harmful programs.
• DPI Services; This is the name given to Deep Packet Inspection procedures and is responsible for adding a second layer of security to the system, to review the deep content of received information packets.

At Apen, as cybersecurity specialists, we always recommend installing a antivirus for businesses that it is powerful and of high quality regardless of the size of the SME, because we know the importance of this type of process for good business management and operation.