Security Precautions

Firewalls

A firewall is software or hardware that restricts access to your network.

The firewall decides what data is allowed through the connection, and can block risky connections, or connections from specific computers (e.g. a hacker).

Firewalls protect against hackers, not viruses.

A firewall can be used to:

  • check that incoming packets meet specific rules before being allowed in

  • set rules about which stations on a network can send or receive packets

Rules are created that take account of the following:

  • sender (source) IP address

  • receiver (destination) IP address

  • port numbers

  • protocols

Encryption

Data can be protected with encryption. When you encrypt data, it becomes coded, or unreadable, so that only the intended recipient can understand it.

We usually encrypt sensitive data when we send it over the Internet. This means that even if a criminal got access to the data, it wouldn’t make sense to them, as it would be scrambled and unreadable. WhatsApp routinely encrypts all messages sent across its network.


The data is encoded using a key and once the data is sent the receiver uses the decryption key to decode the data.