Every day, companies face the challenge of protecting their systems against external attacks. Firewalls can help to fend off a large part of the attacks in advance.
Firewalls have the primary task of preventing unwanted access to the (local) networks to be protected.
Such systems are basically used at two different points in the IT infrastructure.
A distinction is made between personal firewalls and network firewalls:
Firewall solutions now check much more than the original packet filter firewalls, which allowed, blocked or dropped network traffic according to source, destination and the protocol or service used. Increasingly frequent and also more complex attacks on companies show why dedicated firewalls with extensive protection and logging capabilities are enormously important. Because once attackers get into the victim's network, the damage is often immense!
An attack method on networks and their server systems that has been used for a long time but is still frequently used are DoS (Denial of Service) or DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service). The aim of these attacks is to bring a certain service or server to a standstill by sending a very high number of requests. In DoS attacks, one computer is used to send the constant requests to the target system, whereas in DDoS, many different systems paralyse the affected target. Other threats are viruses, worms and Trojan horses. These belong to the class of malware, i.e. malicious software that can lead to data theft and data loss, among other things. In seemingly harmless programmes or scripts, there is embedded malicious code. As soon as this code has been executed, the end device is considered infected and the malware begins to read sensitive data (such as passwords, address data, account data, etc.) in the background. One type of attack that has become particularly popular in recent years is the infiltration of ransomware. This can be described as an encryption Trojan and usually blocks complete access to the captured system by encrypting all data. The attackers often blackmail the victims with a ransom demand in order to regain access to the system. However, such a payment is no guarantee that the user data will be decrypted again afterwards!
Firewalls play a major role in increasing the level of protection against such unwanted access or attacks. Next-generation firewalls in particular can contribute to better defence against the attacks described. This means that the data packets are analysed down to the last detail so that possible malware can be detected and blocked even in the case of supposedly harmless traffic. Manufacturers sometimes use the following protective mechanisms for this purpose:
In addition, next-generation firewalls nowadays also offer functions such as spam filters, quality of service guidelines or even application- or user-specific filtering options. Depending on the requirements, different modules can be combined and activated according to the desired level of protection.
Without question, firewalls are one of the most important components when it comes to protecting against intruders and attacks on network infrastructures. The number of network attacks is growing and growing, but firewall manufacturers are also providing good countermeasures through continuously improved protection mechanisms.
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