

In the far left navigation pane, click the “Outbound Rules” link This displays all the existing outbound firewall rules in the middle pane. Mucking up your firewall rules is a surefire way to a big headache. Note: There is a lot going on in the advanced interface and we encourage you follow along closely, leaving anything outside the scope of the tutorial and your experience level alone. To do so navigate to the Control Panel and select “Windows Firewall.” In the “Windows Firewall” window, click the “Advanced Settings” link on the left. To create a Window Firewall rule, you first need to open up the advanced Firewall interface, which is named, appropriately enough, Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. Creating a Windows Firewall RuleĪlthough we’ll be demonstrating this trick on Windows 10, the basic layout and premise has remained largely unchanged over the years and you can easily adapt this tutorial to earlier versions of Windows. Let’s take a look at how to block an application from accessing the local network and Internet now.

Regardless of why you want to drop the cone of network connectivity silence over a given application, a trip into the guts of the Windows Firewall is an easy way to do so.

You might be using an application with really obnoxious ads that can be silenced by cutting off the application’s Internet access. You might have a video game that you’re comfortable with your child playing, but you’re not so comfortable with the online (and unsupervised) multiplayer elements. You might have an application that insists on automatically updating itself, but find that those updates break some functionality and you want to stop them. Some simple and commonplace examples are as follows. Others may have opened this tutorial curious as to why one would block an application in the first place.Īlthough you generally want your applications to have free access to the network (after all what good is a web browser that can’t reach the web) there are a variety of situations in which you may wish to prevent an application from accessing the network. Some of you might have been sold immediately by the headline, as blocking an application is exactly what you’ve been wanting to do.
