Who are these “hackers” who are trying to break into your computer? Most people imagine someone at a keyboard late at night, guessing passwords to steal confidential data from a computer system. This type of attack does happen, but it makes up a very small portion of the total network attacks that occur. Today, worms and viruses initiate the vast majority of attacks. Worms and viruses generally find their targets randomly. As a result, even organizations with little or no confidential information need firewalls to protect their networks from these automated attackers.
If a worm or a virus does find a security vulnerability and compromises your system, it can do one of several things. To begin with, it will almost always start looking for other systems to attack so that it can spread itself further. In this case, you become one of the bad guys—because the worm or virus is using your computer to attack other systems on your internal network and the Internet, wasting your computing resources and bandwidth. Even though the worm or virus won’t know what to do with your confidential data, chances are good that it will open a new back door into your system to allow someone else to further abuse your computer and compromise your privacy. Worms and viruses have dramatically increased the need for network security of all kinds—especially the need for host-based firewalls.
Individuals still launch some attacks, though, and these are generally the most dangerous. The least worrisome attackers focus on crashing computers and networks by using Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Others might be looking for confidential data that they can abuse for profit, such as sales contacts, financial data, or customer account information. Still others might be amassing hundreds or thousands of computers from which to launch a distributed attack against a single network on the Internet.
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