The mythical Wall of Fire : “How could this have happened, I am behind a firewall?”

A firewall is often assumed to be some kind of magic bullet.

This short article covers the essence of what a firewall is – and more importantly what it is not.

The word Firewall is borrowed from another application. A noun describing the barrier between the engine and the crew compartment through which controls pass, and fire, cannot [fayuh r-wawl]. As such we will find them on boats, ships, planes… as well as where we tend to apply the word these days – computing.

Dwelling more on the controls than the fire part there – allowing control or use through a barrier.

Without veering off on an adventure covering protocols, ports, and networking – lets just say that we can allow web and email traffic in and out from the entire world, and access to the controls, the back office, administration to only a given set of locations.

As such if bad things happen, and they come in over services exposed to the public – such as mail or web – then the firewall has done it’s job…. even if bad things have occurred. “But I thought we were behind a firewall” – you probably were… however it is not a panacea, it is part of a solution. #JustSaying

So I guess that asks the question what can I do to further secure myself?

In terms of restricting access, and help control what is passing in and out of your site there are plenty of other tools you can bring to the party – either in the form of vendor supplied appliances, or services that filter content upstream.

Web Application Firewalls (WAF);

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation;

Content Delivery Network (CDN);

IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection/Prevention System);

… all something very much for another article.However all of these are part of a layered approach we can provide on request, or simply advise upon.

If you have concerns over your shared hosting, virtual machine, dedicated services, or transit – do not hesitate to contact sales or technical to talk about your needs, architecture, security both physical network / service related… we will be only to glad to advise and assist.