The Expert Podcast

So what is a reverse firewall on your network, and how can it help you with a cyberattack? If your business—small, medium, or even a large enterprise—is at risk for a cyber attack, ransomware, or some other event that affects your cyber security, One of the things you want to have in place even before any of this happens is a reverse firewall.

A firewall typically prevents attackers from entering your network, right? It prevents access to your system. You also want to have an isolate mode on your system so that if you detect a cyber attack or some anomaly, you can go into this isolate mode where outbound traffic also does not exit your system because you don't want the hackers to watch what you're doing internally when you are defending against a hack.

Once you put your system into isolate mode, everything you do behind this reverse firewall is done secretly, so the hackers can't watch you and play chess with you about defending your network. Once you go into isolate mode, you can do all your defenses and exercise all the tools that your hacker has put into your system. Then, once everything is cleared up, you can go back into open mode and resume business.

Having this isolate mode in your company will prevent the damage that a hacker can do because usually hackers get into your system long before they launch their attack, and by detecting this, going into isolate mode, and removing it, you can prevent damage. If you don't enable the isolate mode, what happens is that the hackers will see you starting to respond to their attack, and then they'll launch the full attack, which you might not be able to defend against.

So, while you're in this temporary isolate mode with the reverse firewall, you can back up your system, restore all the damage that's been done, remove the intrusive tools that have been put into your network, and then go back into normal operating mode with an inoculation against a future attack.

Make sure your IT department or you have a cyber security defense system in place for this isolation mode. It's easy to do, it's relatively inexpensive, and you don't have to spend a lot of time doing it. Once it's there, you don't have to work on it every single day. You only have to put it in place if you detect an attack, and that's another part of the defense system: constant monitoring and scanning to make sure you don't have malicious tools put on your network.