Personal Firewalls

We have been looking at ways to protect your entire network from intruders but its also prudent to protect each individual computer on your network with a personal firewall.

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Wireless routers and wireless access points have hardware firewalls that protect your network from harm coming from the internet. As we have said before these firewalls do not protect you from threats inside your network. This is where a personal firewall comes into play. A personal firewall protects each computer on its own merit regardless of the connected network computers. Its advisable to have these firewalls turned on in order to protect unauthorised access to your files that you haven't decided to share.

Windows XP comes with its own personal firewall built right into the operating system and is very easy to activate. You will find that Windows prompts you to turn the firewall on when you install it and when it discovers that there will be data flow in and out of the system. The default settings block the incoming connections to your machine and will prompt you to either continue blocking or allow the resource to be shared with the incoming connection. If you allow then the ports that are being used by that resource will be opened for use. You can of course close them again if need be. Things such as peer to peer software and games require that certain ports be opened before they will work. If this is the case again windows will prompt you to open only the ports for the resource that is required.

Setting up Windows firewall is really simple. If you already have a wireless network activated on your computer you should have an icon at the bottom of your screen in the system tray providing you haven't turn the icon off in the properties :). If you right click on the wireless network icon and select "Change Windows Firewall Settings" you will taken direct to the Windows firewall section of Windows security centre.

Once into the firewall setting you will see a screen with a green and red shield on it. A radio button next to each the green shield for windows firewall being enabled and a red shield for the firewall being disabled. Fairly self explanatory, select whether you want windows firewall to be on or off. If you select on a checkbox will be available to you that says "don't allow exceptions" checking this box will stop any programs that are in your exceptions list from using the ports you opened for them. This checkbox is for maximum security but minimum usability over a network and the internet. Not having this box checked will allow certain programs and games to have access to your machine and the network.

The second tab in the Windows Firewall properties window shows which programs, applications, games and other resources you have chosen to unblock when prompted by windows. From this screen you can add more programs to the exception list, remove programs from the exception list and edit the ports that you have allowed to be opened by which program. These programs will not have access to your computer through the internet or network if the "don't allow exceptions" checkbox is checked.

Other firewalls are available that offer more configuration for specific needs. Easily the most popular is ZoneAlarm from Zone Lab.