Firewalls and network security measures Flashcards
What is a firewall?
A network security device that monitors traffic to and from your network.
What are the different types of firewalls?
Hardware
Software
Cloud-based
What is a Hardware firewall?
The most basic way to defend against threats to a network.
A physical device.
It inspects each data packet before it’s allowed to enter the network.
What is a software firewall?
A software program installed on a computer or on a server. It inspects each data packet before it’s allowed to enter the network.
Installed on a computer, it will analyse all the traffic received by that computer.
Installed on a server, it will protect all the devices connected to the server.
What disadvantage does a software firewall have compared to a hardware firewall?
Because it is a software program, it will add some processing burden to the individual devices.
What are cloud-based firewalls?
Cloud service providers offer firewalls as a service, or FaaS (Function as a Service), for organizations.
Cloud-based firewalls are software firewalls hosted by a cloud service provider.
Organizations can configure the firewall rules on the cloud service provider’s interface, and the firewall will perform security operations on all incoming traffic before it reaches the organization’s onsite network.
Additionally, protecting any assets or processes that an organization might be using in the cloud.
How are firewalls classified?
By how the firewall operates
What are the classifications of firewalls?
Stateful and stateless
How does a stateful firewall operate?
Keeps track of information passing through it and proactively filters out threats.
It analyses network traffic for characteristics and behaviour that appear suspicious and stops them from entering the network.
How does a stateful firewall operate?
Based on predefined rules and does not keep track of information from data packets.
It only acts according to preconfigured rules set by the firewall administrator.
The rules programmed by the firewall administrator tell the device what to accept and what to reject.
What don’t stateless firewalls do?
Stateless firewalls don’t store analysed information.
They don’t discover suspicious trends like a stateful firewall does. Therefore, considered less secure that stateless.
Next generation firewall (NGFW)
A stateful firewall providing even more security.
Inspects incoming and outgoing traffic, performs more in-depth security functions like deep packet inspection and intrusion protection.
Some NGFWs connect to cloud-based threat intelligence services so they can quickly update to protect against emerging cyber threats.
They are proxy servers are used to add a layer of security to the network.
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