It’s important to use at least one type of a firewall – a hardware firewall (such as a router) or a software firewall. This also prevents users from changing them on their computers. If you run a large network, you can easily configure the firewall’s settings from a single device.

Hardware firewalls can provide centralized network management.

However, that worm couldn’t disable your hardware firewall.

A hardware firewall sits apart from your computer – if your computer becomes infected with a worm, that worm could disable your software firewall.

This feature is easy to use with a third-party firewall, but you can also prevent applications from connecting to the Internet with the Windows firewall. In addition to controlling incoming traffic, a software firewall can prompt you when an application on your computer wants to connect to the Internet and allow you to prevent the application from connecting to the network.

Software firewalls allow you to easily control network access on a per-application basis.

If other computers on your network become infected, the software firewall can protect your computer from them.

A hardware firewall sits between your computer and the Internet, while a software firewall sits between your computer and the network.

(Although this feature may not be present on some routers.) Both can block certain types of outgoing traffic.Both block unsolicited incoming traffic by default, protecting potentially vulnerable network services from the wild Internet.Hardware and software firewalls overlap in some important ways:

Firewall in computer