Do you believe this famous saying?

“A coin has two sides” or “There’s no rose without a thorn.”

It makes sense to me.

Let’s take the example of technology.

While technology has the power to transform the way we live, it also has the potential to take it all back.

That’s right!

Cyberattacks have become so frequent that you could see a new headline flashing every second day about a high-profile organization becoming the victims.

Not only are organizations suffering, but many public figures as well. Money and fame, everything could be at risk due to cybercriminals spoofing around. And the irony is that its solution also lies in mighty Technology itself. The technology to counteract such malicious activities could be firewalls.

A firewall is a protective barrier that can protect your network by preventing unauthorized access. With the number of attacks rising high, the global market for network performance management reached $11 billion in 2019, says this report.

It has many types, including network firewalls, software, cloud, and hardware-based firewall, application firewall, and more.

So, sometimes it becomes confusing to differentiate between network and application firewalls.

But not anymore; because in this article, I’m going to discuss that and put some more light on network firewalls and recommendations for it.

Stay tuned!

What is a Network Firewall?

A network firewall is a system that is capable of controlling access to your organization network and thereby protects your network. It acts as a filter to block non-legitimate incoming traffic before it could enter your organization’s network to cause damage.

Its major purpose is to provide protection to an inside network by separating it from the outside network. It also controls the communications between both the networks.

The different types of network firewalls are:

• Packet filters: They are traditional firewall systems that rely on packet attributes such as IP address of source and destination, protocols, and ports associated with individual packets. These attributes determine whether the packet or inkling traffic must be given access through the firewall or not.
• Stateful inspection firewalls: these firewalls have added capability of inspecting packets belonging to a complete session. If a session is perfectly established between two end-points, it permits communication.
• Application layer firewalls: they can examine application-layer information like an HTTP request, FTP, etc. If it finds some non-legitimate applications, it can block them right there.
• Next-generation firewalls: They are advanced firewalls with deep inspection capabilities beyond protocol or port blocking and inspection. It includes application-level inspection, intelligence, intrusion prevention, web application firewalls, etc.

How is it different than the Application Firewall?

Not every firewall is capable of protecting your system from all sorts of threats. For this, businesses consider using mainly two types of firewalls – network firewall and web application firewall (WAF). It’s important to understand the difference between these two firewalls to ensure better security for your network.

For this, let’s understand a bit about WAF in the first place.

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) can protect web applications from vulnerabilities unique to web applications and HTTP/S security loopholes.

In IT, digital security is divided into seven layers. WAFs provide the 7th layer of security, which is also termed as application-layer security.

Web applications are targeted with different attacks, including:

• Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
• Cross-site Scripting (XSS)
• SQL injection
• Brute force
• Spam
• Session hijacking

Difference

• Security Layer: Network firewalls perform at layer 3-4, which includes vulnerabilities associated with the incoming and outgoing network traffic as well as data transfer. WAFs operate at layer 7, which includes application-specific vulnerabilities, as mentioned above.
• Focus: Network firewalls are focused on protecting inbound and outbound traffic, whereas WAFs protect applications.
• Operation Mode: Network firewalls utilize two methods of operation – transparent and routed modes.  WAFs operate on – active inspection and passive mode.
• Placement: Network firewalls are placed on the network perimeter, whereas WAFs are placed close to the Internet-facing applications.
• Attack protection: Network firewalls protect from vulnerabilities like less secure zones and unauthorized access. WAFs protect from SQL injections, DDoS, and XSS attacks.
• Algorithms: Network firewalls use algorithms like packet filtering, proxy, and stateful inspection. WAFs use anomaly detection, heuristics, and signature-based algorithms.

#security #coding #geekflare #stop attacks