From the course: CompTIA A+ (220-902) Cert Prep: 6 Securing Computers

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Hardware firewalls

Hardware firewalls

- A hardware firewall is some kind of magical box that sits between your little network and the Internet and it protects you from the evils of the Internet, and then also, to some extent, protects the Internet from the evils of you. A firewall can manifest in a lot of different ways. So here's my little network, and I've got my switch here, here's all my different computers, and here's my router. So one way a firewall can manifest itself is a router itself that has some extra smarts built into it. You can even go so far as to go out and buy another box that sits between your whole network and the Internet and does nothing more than protects you. Now, the way it protects really depends on what we're looking at here. So the easiest way to break this down, for starters, is there are two kinds of firewalls in this world. There are stateful firewalls and there are stateless firewalls. A stateless firewall is something that you configure via an Access Control List and you'll say things like…

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