Gain insights into cyber security fundamentals, explore common threats, discover protection mechanisms like firewalls, learn monitoring and response strategies, and develop secure systems as a developer.

Modern computer systems are almost universally connected, which creates wider attack surfaces well beyond code to users, hardware, and more. Securing systems is thus a fundamental skill for modern software engineers.

This course is a comprehensive introduction to cyber security best practices. You’ll start with an overview of common threats and vulnerabilities, as well as high-level concepts like privilege, integrity, logging, and mediation. With these concepts in mind, you’ll then learn common protection mechanisms and defense strategies from endpoint protection to firewalls, gateways, and proxy servers. Next, you’ll learn monitoring and detection techniques, alerts, and event management. Finally, when you detect a threat, you’ll know how to respond with support tickets, data preservation, and change management.

By the end of this course, you’ll have a better understanding of modern cyber security practices and a clear roadmap to implementing these as a developer.

Cyber Security Best Practices for Developers

# Overview

A **host-based** **firewall** is a software agent that runs on a device to prevent certain malicious data from being sent to or received by the device. This section discusses two types of host firewalls:
 

- Network

- Web browser

# Host-based network firewall

A host-based network firewall runs on a device to prevent certain network-based activity from being received by the host it’s running on. This type of firewall isn’t to be confused with a general network-based firewall, which focuses on the entire network. The focus of a host-based network firewall is the individual device it’s installed on, and these types of firewalls are bundled with most modern operating systems.

## How it works

Firewalls can be set to allow traffic only from specific IP addresses and ports. A port can be referred to as a service running on a device. A web server, for example, is a service and by default, it uses port `80`. With a firewall, most of the traffic inbound to the device, including malicious traffic, is blocked. If tuned correctly, the firewall only allows legitimate traffic through.

When a new device is connected to the internet, it only takes a matter of seconds until network logs show evidence of scans, probes, and generic attacks from IP addresses located throughout the world. To protect the device from this type of malicious activity, a firewall blocks all unnecessary ports, thereby reducing the device’s attack surface.



Learn about two different firewalls and their situational use in an organization.

Introduction

Basics of Security

Detect

Protect

Respond

Conclusion

Host-based Firewall

Overview

Host-based network firewall