All firewalls can detect certain kinds of known malicious traffic. What can a firewall protect against?įirewall capabilities vary quite a bit from basic home firewalls to advanced NextGen firewalls designed to protect critical enterprise systems. For example, firewalls may be used to block a device from receiving any traffic originating from an external network, block off unused ports, or block all traffic except packets coming from a list of pre-approved IP addresses. It's also directed toward one of many ports, each of which are meant for different purposes.įirewalls inspect this metadata and either block or allow it. An individual packet has a source IP address and a destination IP address, which basically says where it's coming from and where it's going. How does a firewall protect data?ĭata transmitted over the internet has several categories of metadata associated with it.

But it generally refers to hardware or software used to prevent the spread of malware or to detect data leakage in computer networks. Today, the term may be used in other contexts such as financial firewalls erected to prevent the spread of insider information.

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