What is a Firewall? A firewall is a tool that monitors communication to and from your computer. It sits between your computer and the rest of the network, and according to some criteria, it decides which communication to allow, and which communication to block. | What is a Firewall A firewall is a tool that monitors communication to and from your computer. It sits between your computer and the rest of the network and according to some criteria it decides which communication to allow and which communication to block. It may also use some other criteria to decide about which communication or communication request to report to you either by adding the information to a log file that you may browse whenever you wish or in an alert message on the screen and what not to report. What Is It Good For Identifying and blocking remote access Trojans. Perhaps the most common way to break into a home computer and gain control is by using a remote access Trojan RAT . sometimes it is called backdoor Trojan or backdoor program . Many people simply call it a Trojan horse although the term Trojan horse is much more generic . A Trojan horse is a program that claims to do something really innocent but in fact does something much less innocent. This goes to the days where the Greek soldiers succeeded to enter through the gates of Troy by building a big wooden horse and giving it as a present to the king of Troy. The soldiers allowed the sculpture to enter through their gates and then at night when the soldiers were busy guarding against an outside attack many Greek soldiers who were hiding inside the horse went out and attacked Troy from the inside. This story which may or may not be true is an example of something which looks like something innocent and is used for some less innocent purpose. The same thing happens in computers. You may sometimes get some program via ICQ or via Usenet or via IRC and believe this program to be something good while in fact running it will do something less nice to your computer. Such programs are called Trojan horses. It is accepted to say that the difference between a Trojan horse and a virus is that a virus has the ability to self-replicate and to distribute itself while a Trojan horse lacks this ability. A .
