FAQs
How does a firewall protect data?
A firewall minimises breaches of your data by surrounding your network with a filter. The filter only allows traffic onto the network if it meets a set of rules that you’ve established – often with the help of your managed firewall provider.
What are the types of firewalls?
There are several different types of firewalls:
- Packet-filtering firewall applies rules to packets of data, only allowing through the packets that meet these rules.
- Stateful multi-layer inspection firewall compares incoming data packets against the state of data packets that are already known to be safe.
- Application-level gateway firewall uses a proxy server for remote users to access, and hides any computers behind the firewall.
- Circuit-level gateway firewall doesn’t filter packets, but it hides details of your network from external traffic, blocking it from view for attackers.
- Next generation firewall combines traditional firewall technology with more advanced techniques like gathering intelligence from multiple clients.
- Cloud firewall or firewall-as-a-service filters traffic like a traditional firewall, but it’s hosted in the cloud and filters data from multiple sources.
Can firewalls prevent DDoS attacks?
Many firewalls claim to protect against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Not all do.
For the best protection, you need to look for solutions that use adaptive behaviour. These have the ability to learn your baseline behaviour and compare that behaviour with all incoming traffic.
In the case of a DDoS attack, an adaptive behaviour firewall would identify a surge in network traffic as an anomaly, and take the appropriate action to keep your IT estate secure.
Read more about our distributed denial of service (DDoS) security
