- Jan 8, 2011
- 22,361
HOWTOGEEK.COM - How to Block An Application from Accessing the Internet with Windows Firewall
Why Do I Want To Do This?
Although 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.
CREATING A WINDOWS FIREWALL RULE - How to Block An Application from Accessing the Internet with Windows Firewall
Why Do I Want To Do This?
"Some of you might have been sold immediately by the headline, as blocking an application is exactly what you’ve been wanting to do. Others may have opened this tutorial curious as to why one would block an application in the first place.
Although 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 simple and commonplace examples are as follows. You might have an application that insists on automatically updating itself (but those updates break some functionality and you wish to stop the updates). 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 be using an application with really obnoxious ads that can be silenced by cutting off the application’s Internet access.
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. Let’s take a look at how to block an application from accessing the local network and Internet now."
Although 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 simple and commonplace examples are as follows. You might have an application that insists on automatically updating itself (but those updates break some functionality and you wish to stop the updates). 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 be using an application with really obnoxious ads that can be silenced by cutting off the application’s Internet access.
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. Let’s take a look at how to block an application from accessing the local network and Internet now."
Although 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.
CREATING A WINDOWS FIREWALL RULE - How to Block An Application from Accessing the Internet with Windows Firewall