Firewalls – are they really needed?

You need a ‘Firewall’ for the same reason you lock the front door of your house at night. Firewalls keep Internet thieves and vandals from stealing information from or vandalising your PC. In the information age, vandalising the software on a PC or theft of information from it can have serious consequences.

These consequences can range from removing money from your bank account to dishonest use of stolen personal information. The operation of software systems on a PC can be compromised after invasion be a hacker. Hacker's after gaining control of your PC can use it to invade other PCs on the internet.

Restoring PCs that have failed because of external attacks can be a time consuming and costly task if they are not backed up correctly.

Selecting the correct ‘Firewall’ is a critical task. Their are a number of products on the market all making grand claims. Check what the various PC and Internet publications have to say about the products. If you use a IT consultant see what he recommends, or check with your local PC user group.

I use ‘ZoneAlarm‘, it has gotten some good write ups from various publications. It has an indicator on the task bar that shows when information is being sent or received by the PC. This can alert the operator if a download fails without giving a error message.

Make sure the ‘Firewall’ is kept up to date with the latest changes so it can stop all attacks. Protection from hacking is an ongoing problem.

If the PC’s in your business are networked; a secondary Firewall may be needed between machines that have access to the internet and machines that access critical company data.