history of firewall

The term "firewall" originally meant a wall to confine a fire or potential fire within a building, cf. firewall (construction). Later uses refer to similar structures, such as the metal sheet separating the engine compartment of a vehicle or aircraft from the passenger compartment.

Firewall technology emerged in the late 1980s when the Internet was a fairly new technology in terms of its global use and connectivity. The predecessors to firewalls for network security were the routers used in the late 1980s to separate networks from one another. The view of the Internet as a relatively small community of compatible users who valued openness for sharing and collaboration was ended by a number of major internet security breaches which occurred in the late 1980s:

• Clifford Stoll's discovery of German spies tampering with his system
• Bill Cheswick's "Evening with Berferd" 1992 in which he set up a simple electronic jail to observe an attacker
• In 1988 an employee at the
  NASA
  
  Ames Research Center
  in California sent a memo by
  email
  to his colleagues that read,

“

We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS! It has hit Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames.

”

• The Morris Worm spread itself through multiple vulnerabilities in the machines of the time. Although it was not malicious in intent, the Morris Worm was the first large scale attack on Internet security; the online community was neither expecting an attack nor prepared to deal with one.