Every business in Omaha or Lincoln needs IT security. That much is obvious when you consider the hackers target is small and large businesses alike. How you achieve the right amount of security for your business is the big question.

Rather than assault you with endless lists and technical explanations, we would like to talk about one of the most  important aspects of security: firewalls.

Today, you can learn how firewalls work to protect you from hackers. You will also learn about the limitations of firewalls and why devices alone are not quite enough to keep you safe.

How Firewalls Protect Your Business

You hear about firewalls plenty, but what do they actually do? How do they actually help you in the fight against hackers?

Firewalls can perform a number of functions. It is through various strategies and processes that they work in your favor. Among all that firewalls can do, these four functions stand out as the most powerful and useful:

Reconnaissance

Reconnaissance refers to strategies that can be used to attack or defend your network. Attackers use reconnaissance techniques to scan for your open ports and gather information. They can then use that information to develop a customized plan of attack tailored to your network.

On the other hand, you can use reconnaissance to find weaknesses before an attacker and continue to improve your defenses.

Network firewalls help with defensive reconnaissance by enabling you to control or specify addresses and net-masks. With firewall controls, you can probe your network to figure out where a hacker is most likely to attack before it becomes a problem.

Scanning

One of the great threats to any network (or network-connected device) is malware. In particular, ransomware (a type of malware) threatens and damages many businesses each year.

Firewalls contain features designed specifically to prevent malware incursions. Those features fall under the category of scanning, which often involves deep packet inspection. 

The firewall stands between your network and any download or upload. It’s a digital gateway, and because of that, it can scan every single packet that comes to your network. With this scanning, it can spot and isolate malware before it has a chance to cause damage.

In the event that malware does cause harm, firewall scanning can help you isolate the issue much faster, mitigating the problem.

Privilege Control

At its simplest, hacking is gaining access to computer systems. 

Privilege control is the group of mechanisms that determine who can access what within a computer system.

Depending on the design of your network and systems, access control lives in many areas, and one of those areas can be a firewall.

The firewall’s primary role is controlling access to your network from the broader internet. With many options available, you can control privileges and minimize hacking and related security concerns for your Omaha-based business.

Whitelists

Privilege control breaks cleanly into three categories. Whitelists block any traffic that doesn’t come from a pre-approved location. It’s the most powerful form of privilege control, but it can create cumbersome interactions, especially for networks that need to frequently download data from new sources.

Blacklists

Blacklists invert the idea and specifically block known bad traffic. It’s the lowest level of protection because you need previous knowledge of where the attacks are coming from in the first place, but it gives users on the network the most freedom.

Blacklists + Algorithms

The third option uses a combination of blacklists and algorithms to keep your network secure and block unauthorized access. Any known-malicious source is automatically blocked. Beyond that, algorithms can detect patterns that identify malicious connections and block them before they wreak havoc on your network.

Data Control

The last line of defense you get from a firewall is network segmentation. The firewall can stand between your network and the greater internet, but it can also stand between and protect different parts of your own network.

For instance, you could have a business network that uses an in-house server to store data backups. That server is connected to the network so any other device can easily send backups to it, but you don’t want outsiders to access your private data.

While you can have a firewall outside the whole network, you can also put a firewall between the data server and everything else. This extra layer of protection can specifically limit who, what, and how data is pulled off of the backup server.

In more technical terms, the firewall controls data exfiltration. This helps protect your business from data breaches. It can also help with ransomware attacks. If your backups remain unaffected by an attack, then you have a reliable way to restore your data.

Fitting Firewalls Into a Broader Security Strategy

Firewalls offer a lot in terms of digital protection. With many features and functions, plus the ability to use multiple firewalls in a single network for compounded safety, you can’t afford to overlook them.

Still, they are only one part of the equation, and it’s just as important to understand their limitations.

Vulnerabilities

Every network has vulnerabilities. Firewalls are designed to deal with many of them, but they don’t offer perfect protection. In fact, nothing offers perfect protection. That’s what makes cybersecurity in Omaha and Lincoln, NE so challenging.

To understand this idea, consider an organizations’ network that has strong Wi-Fi coverage. Maybe it’s a hospital. The hospital deploys firewalls to protect their network, but it also makes Wi-Fi available to visitors. Skilled and malicious hackers could use that access to take advantage of others or gain access to other parts of the network if the guest Wi-Fi is not separated from the internal networks. 

This doesn’t mean firewalls are not doing their job. It simply means that robust IT support providers in Omaha use next-generation firewalls (NGFW) as one piece of a larger security strategy. Firewalls still add significant protection, so don’t discount their usefulness!

DDoS

DDoS attacks are particularly frustrating. For anyone unfamiliar, this is a direct denial of service attack. It works by flooding a network resource, web application, website or data center with so many connection requests that the hardware can’t keep up and starts to crash.

Firewalls offer limited protection against DDoS attacks, largely because they are one of the components that can crash in the face of too many requests.

Modern firewalls do have functions that reduce the risk of DDoS attacks, however putting layered security solutions in place and recognizing what is occurring and contacting your IT support will minimize what the attacker can accomplish. 

Internal Attacks

The ultimate weakness of a firewall is the same one that plagues all aspects of cybersecurity. If the attack comes from within the network, it’s a lot harder to stop.

A basic example is a disgruntled employee attacking your systems from their own workstation. It’s easy to see how they can circumvent security measures and why that is so hard to stop.

Realistically, the majority of internal attacks don’t require malice. Instead, any of your users could create risk with poor password or security hygiene practices. They might fall for a phishing scam, use weak passwords that are too easy to guess, or fall victim to any number of other attacks and ploys.

As powerful as firewalls can be for security, they cannot overcome internal attacks.

Social Engineering

Understanding social engineering explains why internal attacks are such a risk. Social engineering is basically a catch-all term for tricking someone into doing what you want them to do.

In the case of a malicious cyber attacker, social engineering would involve a scam or trick that gets them access to your network. Phishing is a common form of social engineering. More sophisticated efforts can be harder to spot.

One way or another, social engineers often find tricks that work by collecting intel from your social accounts, and then using that information to gain unauthorized access to online accounts or devices, or worse yet your work device. By using various methods social engineers ultimately become internal attackers. 

Firewalls can keep a lot of bad traffic out, but they can’t block these types of hacker schemes that take advantage of members of your organization.

This is why cybersecurity training and awareness are as essential as any hardware.

The bottom line is that you really do need firewalls, and you need to manage them well. But, implementing a firewall is simply a portion of the layered security framework your business needs. Cybersecurity is a pursuit; firewalls are one layer in that pursuit.