In everyday life, a firewall used to mean a flame-resistant barrier installed between buildings or sections of a building. In computing, however, it has a different meaning and can be hardware or can be software. The function is the same, though: to serve as a barrier between computer systems and the internet to prevent unwanted connections to Wi-Fi and internet connections and to stop your own systems from leaking data.
Firewalls have been around since the internet’s early days and have always been necessary. Without them, wrongdoers on the World Wide Web would be able to access private internet connections and wreak all kinds of havoc on a private individual’s computer system or on the systems of a business or organization.
Today, firewalls are much more advanced. Below is a look at the evolution of firewalls, how they’ve progressed since their early days and at the future both of firewalls and of cybersecurity in general.
The early days of firewalls
Firewalls, just like the internet, have come a long way. Initially, they were just a set of rules that controlled access to internal company resources. They were a packet-filtering system that analyzed the information in packets of data and then dropped them or silently discarded them. They’d do this by looking at the destination address, its protocol and the port number.
Although these firewalls were effective at the time, cybersecurity specialists have improved firewalls as time has gone by. The internet has grown. It’s changed, and firewalls have had to do the same to be able to protect people’s and businesses’ computer systems from the many threats out there to them. Just how have firewalls advanced?
The progression of firewalls
Hackers today would sneer at the firewalls of back then, which are likely to offer severely inadequate protection in today’s cyber landscape. Next generation firewalls carried network security much further forward because they were able to determine whether packets of data were part of a new connection of an existing one. This connection state rule made filtering easier but also left the systems wide open for denial of service (DoS) attacks. Hackers were able to overwhelm the firewall with fake data packets, and the connection state memory wouldn’t be able to cope with them.
This led to the third generation of firewalls, an application firewall called Firewall Toolkit (FWTK). FWTKs were able to identify whether a communication protocol was being abused or whether a hacker was trying to bypass the firewall on an allowed port. This was application layer filtering and allowed firewalls to sense how file transfer protocols (FTPs) and hypertext transfer protocols (HTTPs) work and then adapt to the different ways applications made use of them.
Firewalls today employ the same analysis as the application layer but focus more on deep-packet introspection. They can incorporate features such as intrusion detection and prevention, and web application firewalls. Companies are also adding virtual private network (VPN) services to their firewalls, allowing employees to access company resources online safely from less secure internet connections such as public Wi-Fi.
The very fact the traditional perimeters of network security have changed has made platforms from companies such Perimeter 81 much more necessary. Perimeter 81 offers firewall as a service to businesses, allowing them to protect their network by controlling access to it on a highly granular level. Only authorized users will be able to access it.
What the future could hold for firewalls
Firewalls can either come as software or as a device, but a system administrator will want to them to be able to perform traffic introspection in real time without having a detrimental impact on throughput. Large sets of rules that are filtering data packets constantly can cause bottlenecks and harm network performance.
The firewalls of the future must be able to distinguish automatically between genuine traffic and illegitimate traffic so that it can identify threats that haven’t been witnessed before in cybersecurity and address them immediately.
Multipurpose firewalls will start to incorporate other forms of threat prevention than intrusion detection and prevention. The adoption of high-speed internet will force firewalls to filter larger amounts of throughput per second.
What will the future of cybersecurity look like
Of course, in the last couple of years, remote working has become more commonplace. This shift to a newer style of working has made remote working one of the biggest cybersecurity threats for businesses. Hackers will continue to look for systems connected to the internet that are vulnerable or misconfigured and try to take advantage of the security flaws.
Another issue with which companies and organizations, and their cybersecurity experts, will have to deal is the growth of highly targeted cyberattacks. Cybercrime-as-a-service has become more of a trend. Hackers can rent or buy tools to launch an attack. They now have more time to research into companies that are more likely to pay ransoms.
The increasing threats and execution of cyberattacks has fueled growth in the cyber insurance market. This is likely to continue. Meanwhile, filling the talent gap in the cyber security market is still going to be a significant challenge.
As the internet and the threats that are possible to carry out on it have evolved, so have firewalls. No business or organization should leave anything to chance when it comes to protecting their network. Investing in a strong firewall will always be money well spent.