Your Internet connection device has a hardware firewall – why do you also need a software firewall?
I know of no wireless Internet connecting routers, cable or DSL modems, etc. which don’t have a built-in NAT (Network Address Translation) hardware firewall to protect you from online hackers (proper term “crackers”).
So why do you need to also use the Windows firewall, or another software firewall – like the one that comes with the AVG Internet Security software product I recommend?
What if some malware gets in and tries to “phone home”?
The reason to have a software firewall, which I emphasize to my computer consulting clients, is that a hardware firewall is transparent to outgoing Internet traffic. It won’t protect you if a nasty piece of software makes it through your anti-virus product and “calls home” to alert someone to try to take control of your computer.
A good and properly setup software firewall will ask you to approve any suspicious attempt by any software on your computer to create a connection to the Internet. When such a software firewall is first installed, it will scan your computer for programs that it knows are safe and which will need outside connections. These it allows automatically. When software that this new firewall doesn’t recognize tries to connect to the Internet, it ask for your approval.
This may be a bit annoying, but if you tell your software firewall to always allow this software to connect in the future, these alerts will soon become uncommon. The trick is to not approve any connections you don’t understand. That means taking the time to do a Google search on the name in the firewall’s alert message, if you don’t understand what program is trying to gain a connection.
Is this outgoing protection foolproof?
Certainly not – it’s just one more moat around your castle, one more layer of security, one more belt to go with your suspenders.
A malware author can make their nasty little bot pretty smart. It might pretend to be one of your known safe programs and get past your outbound protection in that way. That’s partly why you need a good anti-virus program and why you should do a full anti-virus scan at least once every 24 hours. In that way, any malware should be detected before it can do serious damage.
And that’s another reason to have your anti-virus program update it’s database of “bad guys” more than once per day – so it will recognize any new threats. And leave that anti-virus “heuristics’ option enabled, so your anti-virus product can even recognize brand new suspicious software, which has not yet been added to that database of bad guys.
Until next time – here’s to safe Internet use…
_jim coe
Questions? Want to comment? See below…
Tags: anti-virus, cracker, firewall, hacker, malware, phoning home, security, vulnerability
