Building the Firewall

Why is the firewall important? If you consider networked information
that resides on public network, then you realize all your information is
virtually unprotected.

Now, extend the concept of unprotected information to the store of
data on your wirelessly connected laptop. If a hacker were to gain wireless
access to your wireless information, he could take data directly from
your device as easily as accessing a network repository without any firewall.
This is why it is generally very important for each wirelessly connected
laptop to have a personal firewall protecting its information.

For example, Norton Antivirus is updated every year and can function
on both the PC and Macintosh platforms. This program is highly
recommended because its virus definitions are often updated automatically
without any type of user intervention. These programs consume
very little network bandwidth most of the time and are good at preventing
hackers from sending any viruses to your machine.

Protecting resources on your machine from unauthorized access
requires a slightly different program. Another component of the Norton
Utilities is the Personal Firewall (part of the Internet Security suite of
software). This program installs on your workstation and prevents other
users from accessing your hard disk as a file server.

Another program is called Zone Alarm and enables a personal firewall
that can be configured with various levels of security. You can prevent
any incoming connections to your computer or just enable a light level of
security. The ability to customize your protection allows you to access
specific resources on the Internet that require greater access privileges.
Just like the Antivirus and Personal Firewall programs mentioned
above, this product can be securely updated by the central server at the
manufacturer’s Web site to protect you against new threats that appear
on an almost daily basis.

There is also the benefit that you can change your environmental settings
on the fly, to screen out hackers trying to ping the ports of your
firewall in an attempt to breach a suspected vulnerability.

In order to provide truly secure access, you can configure your firewall
to accept only incoming connections using a virtual private network
(VPN). The idea is to protect your internal resources by adding an extra
layer of protection against any attack where a hacker expects to gain
wireless access to the network.