What is the difference between an SPI firewall and a regular firewall?
A Stateful Packet Inspection firewall provides protection above and beyond a standard firewall. There is a protocol called TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) that is used in 80% of all Internet communications. It is said to be stateful, that is, there are times where it is appropriate to send types of TCP messages and times when it isn’t. Hackers commonly take advantage of this by sending packets with inappropriate TCP states to bog down a computer or force it to crash. Where a firewall will forward all packets mapped to a port. An SPI firewall inspects each packet to determine if that packet is legitimate. This protects your network against malicious attacks that flood your network with inappropriate packets. SPI can also protect computers designated as a DMZ.
