What is a Firewall

In cars, a firewall is what separates the passenger compartment from the engine. It's designed to delay a fire from burning from one side to another. In computers a firewall has a similar function. It's designed to prevent unauthorized transmissions from one network, like the Internet, to another, like your home network and personal computer.

Hi! This is Mike Callahan, Dr. File Finder and welcome to your butterscotch.com tutorial on what is a Firewall? Now in construction, a Firewall is a wall that specifically built to slow the progress of a fire from one side of a building to another or from one room to another. In a computer, a Firewall is described here in Wikipedia, it’s a software or could be a hardware solution to prevent unauthorized access from one network into another network. So for example, from the network that is the internet into your personal computer. Here’s another really good description of how a Firewall works and it show in here is the internet, here’s your Firewall, here are the computers in your home network and it’s monitoring what’s going out and it’s blocking things from coming in. So, it’s letting the things that you like to go out from your computer out to the internet to go out but it’s stopping things from coming into your system without your authorization. I've also included links for both of these pages in the show notes as well as some links to some good Firewall software that’s available on to cast. So, a Firewall is a good piece of protection for your computer and that’s all there’s to it.