- A firewall monitors network traffic on your computer and uses a number of rules or filters to determine whether or not a program should be allowed to access the network
- you could sit at your computer and run netstat over and over and over and over, keeping a constant vigil on the data moving in and out of your computer, or you could use a firewall program to do it for you.
- A firewall can filter data according to IP addresses and domain names, ports and protocols, or even transmitted data. This means that you can do things such as:
- block or allow all data coming from a specific IP address
- block or allow all data coming from a specific domain
- close or open specific ports
- block or allow specific protocols
- block or allow packets which contain specific data strings.
- however, won need to work out all the rules on your own. You can take advantage of the firewalls ability to set these filters itself.
- After you first install a firewall, you will be hit with a flurry of warnings and requests for access, and you will have to determine whether or not a program will be allowed to access the network.
- you more info about Firewalls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(computing)
