Hi everyone! I am a cybersecurity vulnerability researcher and penetration tester professionally and in my personal time, I do a lot of educational outreach. Specifically with high school and middle school students. I recently started a YouTube channel to support some of my lectures in an async manner. I do additional videos like this as well to support interest in various domains. Please check it out and provide some feedback on the material and teaching style--I'm trying to improve these.

In today's video, we talk about the principles of firewalls. If you've ever wondered what a firewall actually does, what it is or how it works, then this video is for you. We are going to stay within operating-system-level firewall configuration today, but the principles are the same on nearly any device.

The first section of this video simply discusses what a firewall is with examples from windows and in the second section we actually get into what a firewall does... and what it doesn't do... and why it's not an end-all-be-all security solution. Wednesday we are going to talk about how to bypass firewalls, but today is going to be a good overview of what the thing actually is.