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FIRE WALLS: THE FOUNDATION OF INTERNET SECURITY
More than one-half of 24 major federal agencies flunked a "computer security report card" issued by a U.S. House subcommittee on government efficiency last November.

Why the bad grades? There were "significant information weaknesses that place a broad array of federal operations and assets at risk of fraud, misuse, and disruption," General Accounting Office investigators said.

Many home computers may be subject to the same "information weaknesses." With the growth of "always-on" broadband Internet access, computer hackers have increasingly targeted home systems for intrusion because they often are poorly protected and unattended.

The first line of defense against such attacks is a personal firewall. A firewall is a traffic director that sorts out undesirable electronic transmissions. Firewalls come in two flavors: software and hardware.

A software firewall is simply an application installed on your computer. Software firewalls analyze information coming to and from your system at the application level, meaning the firewall sorts traffic based on the expected types of data the other applications on your computer would be passing across the Internet. This means that after installing the firewall, you will need to "train" it by accepting and rejecting different types of data until the software knows what kind of traffic you want to receive and what to block.

A software firewall is best suited for a single computer installation and works well for laptops and other mobile systems. However, software firewalls can be intrusive, particularly during the "training" period. They also share the innate vulnerabilities of the operating system and software you use and can affect the performance of your computer. For the most part, though, they can be quite effective.

A hardware firewall is a dedicated component that, at its most basic, controls access to your computer or network at the port level. A port is an electronic address at which communications between computers can be exchanged. Based on the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol that controls Internet communications, each networked computer has 65,536 possible ports. Hardware firewalls work by selectively granting and denying access to these communication ports to allow desirable traffic to pass, while blocking undesirable data.

Because it’s an independent appliance, a hardware firewall is ideal for protecting an entire network of computers with no ill effect on computing performance. When configured properly, a hardware firewall can stop most hackers and can even hide your computer or network entirely from the outside world. However, this type of firewall can be a bit difficult to configure and customize for the novice, and it will not work well for laptops and other mobile systems.

For more information about how to choose a personal firewall, including software and hardware reviews, visit the Home PC Firewall Guide at "www.firewallguide.com".

If you’re not entirely convinced you need a firewall, you can get a better idea of where your system might be vulnerable using Gibson Research Corp.’s free Shields UP! tool. Shields UP! will harmlessly probe your computer for security weaknesses and spell out the vulnerabilities in an online report. To use Shields UP!, go to "www.grc.com".

Reported by Joe Hoyle, electronic media editor, "hoylej{at}ada.org".

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