The Windows Firewall provides built-in security technology to prevent any unwanted connections. In this video, you’ll learn how to enable and disable Windows Firewall, important configuration options, and additional firewall settings.
The security features in our operating systems are designed to stay on all the time by default, but there will be times when you need to do additional troubleshooting. If you need to enable or disable the Windows Firewall, you can use the Control Panel. Or what I’ll use today in this video is the Windows Security app. You do need elevated permissions to turn on or turn off the firewall, so make sure you have the administrator permissions that you’ll need to be able to perform that function.
And if you recall from our previous video on using the Windows Firewall from the Control Panel app, there are separate profiles for each network type. On my network, there is a domain network profile, private network, and public network. So from our Windows front end, I’ll go to the search option. We’ll type in security. And the first option at the top is the Windows Security app.
When this launches, you’ll have the option for virus and threat protection, account protection, and others. And the one we’re looking for is the firewall and network protection. Here, it brings up the main screen of the firewall and network protection, and it shows all three of the profiles that are currently configured on my system for domain network, private network, and public network. You can enable and disable the Windows Firewall directly from the Control Panel. We did that in a previous video. But in this video, we’re going to use the Windows Security app.
If we click the profile for private network, it tells us that this is Network 5. That’s the adapter that’s in my Windows system. And you can see that Windows Defender Firewall is toggled on. If we click that toggle, it prompts the User Account Control to present a screen that says, do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device? In this case, the app is the Windows Security app. In this case, yes we do. We’d like to disable the firewall.
When we do that, we can see that the toggle has changed to off, and there’s a new message on the screen telling us that the private firewall is off, and your device may be vulnerable. To turn this back on, we reverse the process by clicking the toggle. It asks us again if we want to allow this app, the Security app, to make changes to our device. We will say yes, and our Windows Defender Firewall is back on.
One of the options available within each firewall profile is the option for incoming connections. This will allow us to enable or disable incoming connections when we are on a private network. We can enable this by clicking the box that says blocks all incoming connections, including those in the list of allowed apps. So if we’ve created a rule that allows a particular firewall to communicate, by clicking that box, we will block that connection, even though it’s already in that list of allowed apps. This is useful if you’re on an unknown network, or maybe you’re on a public wireless network, and you want to be sure that no other device on that network has access to your computer.
Back inside our private network profile, the option for modifying the incoming connections is at the bottom. And if we click that box, User Account Control asks, do you want to allow this app to make changes to your device. Yes, we do. And now we are blocking all incoming connections, even if we’ve already created a rule to allow that app. To remove that restriction, we simply reverse the process by clicking the box again. It asks if we’d like to make changes. We do. And now we’re back to where we started.
There are also notification settings within Windows Firewall and with our other security features, and we can configure those notification options under firewall and network protection notifications. And we can toggle on and off by different profiles. You’ll find those notification options from the main screen of the firewall settings. If we look all the way down, you’ll see firewall notification settings. This will bring up a link for managing these notifications, and we can manage virus and threat protection notifications, account protection notifications. And if we scroll all the way to the bottom, you will find firewall and network protection notifications.
You can turn those on or off, and this will notify you when Microsoft Defender’s Firewall blocks a new app. And then you can enable or disable which profiles will be active for these notifications. By default, my domain firewall and public firewall is turned on. Let’s say that we would also like to enable these notifications for my private profile. I’ll click that option. It asks if I’d like to make those changes. I would. And now those notification options are enabled for my private profile.
There might also be times when we’re not sure if we’re using the built-in Windows Defender Firewall or if we may have installed a third-party firewall. The way that you determine that is in the option for security providers. From the main screen of the firewall and network protection, we’ll choose the option for firewall notification settings. And at the very top is security providers. We can click the option to manage those providers, and it will tell us which antivirus, firewall, and web protection providers are running on this system.
For antivirus, the system is running Microsoft Defender Antivirus. It gives you information that you can use to open that app. We also have the firewall that’s running on the system, which is Microsoft Firewall. And the firewall is turned on, and we have no providers currently enabled for web protection on the system.