PfSense: A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Tool for Intrusion Detection System

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Cybercrime
Student Name
Institutional Affiliation

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Abstract
The increasing use of the internet has led to emergence of several threats facing computer
systems and network infrastructure whether corporate or individual. It has necessitated the
internet users to the precautionary measures to protect themselves from these looming attacks.
This document will focus on pfSense which is an open source, customized, and free software that
can be used as a firewall or a router. It can adapt to several applications such as using it as a
firewall for large organizations or using it as a home router more easily and is very flexible.

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Introduction
The increasing dependence of the internet has opened up more system vulnerabilities for
attackers to exploit. This has led to institutions investing heavily in cybersecurity strategies to
secure their critical system from attacks. Cyber security is the process of securing networks,
systems, and applications from digital attacks propagated using a computer (Godoy, 2016). Most
of these attacks targets to destroy, change, or just access sensitive information, interrupt normal
business operations, or extort money from victims. It has become quite a challenge to implement
effective and reliable cybersecurity strategies because attackers are becoming more creative and
the number of devices on the internet are increasing. A cybersecurity approach is considered
reliable or successful if it has several protection layers across the network, applications,
computers, or information that the individuals intend to keep safe (Horowitz and Lucero, 2017).
Technology, processes, and people in any organization should complement each other in order to
have an effective and reliable cyberattacks defense system. The users must comply and
understand the basic principles of data security like scanning email attachments before
downloading, using strong passwords, and data backup. It is important for enterprises to have
strategies and frameworks in place to address any successful or attempted attacks. PfSense is one
particular cyber security software that can be used detect and respond to threats and attacks,
protect networks and systems, and provide recovery strategies from attacks (Lehto, 2013). As
technology evolves, more security measures are being invented but also attackers are coming up
with new ways to exploit computer systems. System security is a continuous process and should
be considered as so by organizations in order for them to stay safe and detect any breaches that
may occur fast and address them.
The common cybersecurity strategies that have been used for a long time include DNS filtering,
next-gen firewalls, emails security solutions, and antivirus programs. Cybersecurity attacks can
be in form of extortion attempts, identity theft, data loss or destruction (Lloyd, 2018). It is
important to ensure that individuals and organizations stay ahead of attackers to ensure they
remain secure by using cyber-defense measure available to them. This document will focus on
PfSense software which is a software used to protect computer systems against potential
cyberattacks.

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Tool description
PfSensce is an open source, customized, and free that can be used as a firewall or a router. It was
created in 2004 and was mainly developed to be installed on computers making it provide more
features and flexibility (Hardy, 2010). It can adapt to several applications such as using it as a
firewall for large organizations or using it as a home router more easily and is very flexible.
Installation and maintenance of PfSense is easy and has a very useful user interface accessible
using a browser. PfSense contains several features that are only available in commercial routers
that are very expensive (Josh, 2018). Some of the common uses of PfSense include WAN/LAN
router, VPN router, Firewall, transparent squid proxy server, DNS/DHCP server, wireless
hotspot, DNS blacklist, network address translation, and Load balancing. The reason why
pfSense is recommended over other routers is because it is free, fast, and provides great features.
It also offers complete hardware control facilitating the users to customize the PfSense system
with any device or component. Additionally, it can be installed on various embedded platforms
such as Alix, Soekris, PC-Engines, and many others. pfSense can be used in any imaginable
network of any size and type and is suitable for a network with thousands of computers or one
computer (Kear, 2016).
Role of pfSense in cyber-security
pfSense when used as a firewall supports filtering by destination and source address, IP address,
and by destination and source port. As a firewall, pfSense supports filtering by source and
destination address, by source and destination port, and by IP address. pfSense allows analysis
and filtering of any requests or traffic if sources address filtering is used and IP address has been
set for monitoring and this depends on the firewall rules that have been set (Rubicon, 2018). The
firewall will monitor the IP address that the traffic is going to if destination filtering is used and
necessary actions applied if the destination address falls within the set firewall rules. One of the
best pfSense firewall features is the passive operating system fingerprinting ability which detects
the operating systems’ connections passively and facilitate the firewall to block connections
depending on the operating system of the connecting system (Sylvester, Asante and Twum,
2016). Additionally, it can operate in transparent or bridge mode and supports policy routing
without any additional configuration. pfSense is very essential in ensuring cybersecurity because
of its abilities such as port forwarding, network address translation (NAT); but when using NAT,