1. What is information security?

Information security is the activity of maintaining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all information. These three elements always can not be separated.

• Confindentiality: Ensuring all important information is not leaked or stolen. The information is only allowed to be accessed by authorized persons.
• Integrity: Ensuring that information is not changed or is only allowed to be edited by authorized persons. In addition, integrity ensures that information remains accurate when it is stored or transmitted.
• Availability: Ensuring that information can be accessed by authorized persons whenever they want.

2. Why implement information security solutions?

• Leaking confidential information
• Leaking personal information
• Paralyzing the system
• Infected with virus

Therefore, when using an unsafe computer, without the information security system, it will cause harm to users, causing disputes, lawsuits and damages to individuals, organizations, companies, etc.

3. What is a firewall?

In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls in-&-out network traffic based on predefined security rules. A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted internal network and an untrusted external network, such as the Internet.

4. Why do we need to use firewall?

Firewall plays a very important role to prevent dangerous components such as hackers, worms, or viruses before they can enter our computer.

Firewall brings many beneficial effects to the computer system. Specifically:

• Preventing unauthorized access to private networks. It acts as a doorman, checking all data entering or leaving the private network. When it detects any unauthorized access, it will prevent that traffic from reaching the private network.
• Blocking network attacks.
• Running as security checkpoints by filtering information connected via the internet to a network or personal computer.
• Easily controlling connections to the website or restricting some connections from unwanted users.
• Users can customize the firewall according to their needs by setting appropriate security policies.

5. Different types of firewalls

Firewals are devided into two main types: software firewall and hardware firewall:

• Hardware Firewall:

Being a security device that represents a separate part of hardware placed between an internal and external network (the Internet). This type is also known as Device Firewall.

Unlike software firewall, hardware firewall has its own resources and does not consume any CPU or RAM from host devices. This is a physical device that acts as a gatekeeper allowing or disallowing traffic in-and-out from the internal network to the outside and vice versa.

Configuring and managing hardware firewalls requires knowledge and skills in device configuration, administration, and management to strictly control traffic data and prevent harmful external agents.

• Software Firewall:

A software firewall is installed on the host device (server, personal computer, …). Therefore, this type of firewall is also known as Host Firewall. Because it is attached to a specific device, it must use the resources of this own device to run. Software firewall needs to be installed on each individual device, depending on the number of devices that require security.

Because the software firewall is managed on each device, it is flexible and easy to configure. Users can easily set up the level of protection as they want, providing different levels of security depending on the machine or user.

Protection Anytime, Anywhere: A software firewall protecting a computer is installed anywhere the computer is connected.

Having low deployment costs compared to hardware firewalls