What is firewall software?

A firewall software> is a tool that one can install on his or her device to control the traffic that get in and out from the device, firewall monitors network traffic, in firewall software you can select what software can use the web and what software cant use the web, there are some options that you can configure a firewall to work, most of today’s firewall software has a build in learning algorithm that follow the things you normally do with your computer and base on that decide what may get in and out from the device.

In a firewall software there are build in rules that make the firewall a good tool to stop some of the known malware activities, to use your device in malicious way and to attack your computer, i remember long time ago that after installation of the operation system on a personal computer you had to install a firewall software before connection the computer to the network, due to the fact that there was a virus that manage to take down every newly connected computer if port 135 was not closed, i guess it was only in the near by area where i live.

Beside the default and automatic firewall software configure, you are able, if you want, to customize the default behavior, by changing the firewall configuration, to block special ip address, ports software and so on.

A firewall software is also good to stop ip scanning and other hacking methods, by closing unnecessary ports, monitoring the traffic and write to the logger all the events that it catch, it can also show a message to the user to apply when it suspected something was suspicious in the network, like the run of an email spammer virus or any other software that will try to open a lot of connection to the internet.

If you do a fast search over the web yo can find a lot of firewall software out there, most of them have a free version that you can download and use on your device, also that there is a build in firewall software that come out of the box with microsoft windows that will be activated in case that the operation system will not find another firewall software installed on the computer.

Does a firewall software is enough for security?
No, firewall software is a great tool to monitor the traffic that you have on your network, it is also great to track and block unwanted network traffic and other suspicious activities, but when it come to security i must also recommended to install an anti-virus software, to block, find and remove unwanted viruses that may affected your device in one way or another that can cause you problems, and also to install an anti-malware tool so you will have another fighter on your system to gain better security.

As i mentioned before, there are a lot of great firewall software that you can download from the web, and the upcoming question that people may ask is what is the best firewall software to use, to answer that we will have to make a test and use this test on all the current available firewall software that can download, check each one of them to see if it passes the test and how, and by that we can give each one a scale, there are some companies and magazines that did this test on firewall software and they can tell you what is the best firewall software according to the test they did, i think that you can go to some of the big downloaded file sites and check what are the 3 top downloaded firewall software in the past month or two and try one of them, after all in the basis they all need to do the same job and that is protection your device, i also think that ease of use is very important due to the fact that a lot of home users are not security expert and they need an easy user interface and a friendly configuration area so they can understand how to use it, with option for security expert to configure extra configuration.

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.