what is the difference between an ip packet and an ip address
IP address spoofing The basic protocol for sending data over the Internet network and many other computer networks is the Internet Protocol (IP). The protocol specifies that each IP packet must have a header which contains, among other things, the IP address of the sender of the packet. The source IP address is normally the address that the packet was sent from, but the sender's address in the header can be altered, so that to the recipient it appears that the packet came from another source. The protocol requires the receiving computer to send back a response to the source address, so that spoofing is mainly used when the sender can anticipate the network response or does not care about the response.
Firewall (computing) Packet filters act by inspecting the "packets" which are transferred between computers on the Internet. If a packet does not match the packet filter's set of filtering rules, the packet filter will drop (silently discard) the packet or reject it (discard it, and send "error responses" to the source). Conversely, if the packet matches one or more of the programmed filters, the packet is allowed to pass. This type of packet filtering pays no attention to whether a packet is part of an existing stream of traffic (i.e. it stores no information on connection "state"). Instead, it filters each packet based only on information contained in the packet itself (most commonly using a combination of the packet's source and destination address, its protocol, and, for TCP and UDP traffic, the port number). TCP and UDP protocols constitute most communication over the Internet, and because TCP and UDP traffic by convention uses well known ports for particular types of traffic, a "stateless" packet filter can distinguish between, and thus control, those types of traffic (such as web browsing, remote printing, email transmission, file transfer), unless the machines on each side of the packet filter are both using the same non-standard ports.[18]