Windows Firewall

This week in the Security for Everyone Series we look at the latest version of Microsoft Security Essentials. Security Essentials was released in September 2009 to differing opinions. In a short amount of time independent testing organizations identified Security Essentials as one of the most effective desktop security solutions available. You can read the 7Tutorials review here. In mid-December 2010 Microsoft released Security Essentials 2. In this review we will look at what has changed in the latest version.

Roughly one month prior to the release of Windows 7, Microsoft debuted its consumer antivirus and antispyware solution, Microsoft Security Essentials. This solution does not include a firewall which is understandable since Windows 7 does include one. Microsoft has a sketchy past with previous firewall incarnations that either left systems open for attack or did not provide the customization options that existed in commercial solutions. In this review I will take a closer look at the capabilities of Microsoft Security Essentials and the Windows 7 firewall. I will try to determine if the software giant has managed to stroll into the desktop security space as a solid contender.

In our previous tutorials about the Windows Firewall we've shown everything you can do with it: beginning with how to enable it, accessing defined rules, creating new ones, checking advanced reports and defining advanced communication rules. If you've done lots of configuring on it, something might stop working at some point. In such cases, it would be best to reset all rules to the default ones created by Microsoft and start from scratch. In this tutorial I will show how to do just that.

In a previous article, we talked about the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security and its features. Now it is time to show you how to manage rules using this tool: how to create or delete a rule and how to enable or disable existing rules.

The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security is a tool which allows you a lot more control over the rules applied by the Windows Firewall to protect your computer. With it, you can tweak all properties of every security rule, define new rules or disable undesired ones. In this tutorial I will give you an overview of this tool and all the available features.

It is time to continue our series of articles about the Windows Firewall. In this article I will show how to edit the list of allowed programs and features. You will learn to edit existing connection rules, add new programs to the list of exceptions or remove them from it.

The Windows Firewall has been changed quite a bit since Windows XP. Windows 7 now allows this tool to filter both inbound and outbound traffic or set rules and exceptions depending on the type of network you are connected to. Considering there are quite a few changes, we will start a small series presenting all the capabilities of this security tool. For starters we will show how to access the Windows Firewall, present the basics about how it works and show how to turn it on or off.