[-Jon-]

This is just some information about firewalls.

All of you (hopefully) have a firewall installed on your computer.
But am guessing some of you just have one and dont know why....?
I mean sure you have anti-virus program to get rid of viruses, but what dose a firewall do?

So if you ever wondered about that, you can read this and know why.

What a firewall dose is controll the access to your computer resources.
And if a program wants to access something it has to go through your firewall and you can the firewall to block or allow this access.

And thats all it dose. So why would you want a firewall?

Basically to protect yourself. You can use the interent to connect to other computers. And bad people can use the internet to connect to you.
Their are many reasons why people would want to access your computer.

- To steal your information.
- To crash your computer.
- To use your computer to do something for them.

The last one is the most important. As you know spam e-mail is everywhere.You would think it would be easy to locate and shutdown a spam server.And it used to be. But things change and the bad people develop new ways to annoy us.

What they do now is get your computer to send spam for them.
They do that by making a worm that spreads to thousands of computers.
After they control these computers they use them to send spam.
They tell their wormprogramso send spam from your computer.

This is where your firewall dose its job.
The worm program cannot send spam without using a resource on your computer.
That resource is your internet connection. So when it tryies to send something you will probaly be asked.
"Do you wish to allow 'some_program.exe' to access the internet? yes/no"
If you see a program you do not recognise enter its name into google and see what you can find out.

Keep in mind though someprograms do need to access the internet (like your web browser) so you should allow them.
This is just one example of how a firewall protects you. And why you should have one.

I havnt explained about services, your IP address or ports.
But if anyone wants the extra detail let me know.