Are There Different Types of Firewalls?

There are two main types of firewalls: hardware and software.

A hardware firewall is an external box sitting between the Internet and your computer. For home environments firewall functions are usually integrated in broadband routers, which allow you to connect to the Internet and share the connection with other computers too.

A software firewall is a program running on your computer, which monitors the incoming and outgoing traffic and alerts you in case of doubt.

Our advice is to install a broadband router with internal firewall when possible. Even if you have a single computer, just using a USB broadband modem connects you directly to the Internet, making you more vulnerable. Using a router/firewall will not only improve your connection performance/reliability, but also create a physical separation between your machine and the Internet, thus making life much harder to hackers.