It is estimated that, on average, hackers manage to infiltrate a user’s computer every 39 seconds. This means that at least a third of Americans will be affected by this phenomenon each year. Because of this, protecting some of our most confidential data (such as personal or banking information) should become the highest priority. And the use of a firewall is one of the first lines of defense.
A firewall is a useful tool to stop any dangerous or fraudulent traffic before it enters the network. For example, they prevent specific programs from accessing the Internet when the system considers such activity as too risky.
In this way, without the existence of a firewall, when we access the internet from our computer we could endanger our personal information, making it more prone to suffer certain problems, such as: back door access, the hijacking of a remote connection, fraud or email attacks or even source routing.
Therefore, it is always of certain utility not only to know how to modify the configuration of the firewall that is active on our computer, but what are the measures that, for example, would be activated at this precise moment. Incidentally, users using macOS generally do not need to enable or use the built-in firewall program or service.
Checking the firewall configuration on our PC
We must start by accessing the Start menu of our Windows. The default firewall program used by this operating system can be found in System and Security , in the Control Panel . Although it is also possible to access it if we choose to enter the word ‘Firewall’ in the search bar of the Start menu.
Once this is done, we must click on the Windows Firewall option, which will appear at the top of the search window.
In the new window that opens we will be able to check what is the configuration of our firewall. We should see two sections, both with green shields on the left (which means that for these specific sections the firewall is active), titled “Private networks” and “Public or guest networks”.
If we click on Advanced Settings , which we will find on the left of the main menu, new options will appear, such as:
- Inbound rules: which incoming connections are allowed automatically.
- Outbound rules: which outbound connections are allowed automatically.
- Connection security rules: baselines for connections that the computer will allow and block.
- Monitoring – This is an overview of basic firewall-related monitoring guidelines.
Once the configuration has been verified, or modified, we will only have to save the changes and exit the menu.
And in macOS?
To check the configuration on our Mac we must access System Preferences from the main Apple menu. Then we must click on Security and privacy , and once we have clicked on this section, a window with different tabs will appear. We will have to click on Firewall .
Once inside, the most probable thing is that the Firewall of our Mac is deactivated. This is normal, which comes like this by default. If we want to activate it, we must unlock the menu by clicking on the padlock icon that is available in the lower right part of the window, and enter the administrator credentials.
After activating it, we can access the section on Firewall options , and in turn choose the different options offered by the system, including blocking all incoming connections, automatically allowing some type of specific software (integrated and / or signed), or activate the so-called covert mode.
Once the pertinent changes have been made, we will only have to click on Accept .
