firewall blocking internet connection windows 7

With the release of Windows Vista/2008 Microsoft totally revamped the Windows Firewall to allow for much easier administration. This was a good first step however creating a set of firewall rules using the native group policy setting under Windows Firewall was challenging at best as there most setting had to be configured manually. Corporate IT staff could control this for the users using Group Policy via the Windows Firewall section under Administrative Templates > Network > Network Connections. To get around this issues end users would be prompted when an application wanted to open up a incoming port on the network. The problem with enabling a firewall however is that you generally block all incoming traffic by default which means product such as Skype and/or Windows Messenger could no longer receive incoming call’s or messages. When users installed service pack 2 they were now prompted to turn on the firewall thus protecting them from malicious communications.

As a result of having the firewall turned off by default in there were a number of computer worms of which most notably were the Blaster worm and Sasser worm that spread like wildfire to pretty much any Windows computer that had not been specifically secured.Īs a result Microsoft decided to make a major change with how Windows XP was configured with the release of Service Pack 2. Microsoft then added a host based firewall with the release of Windows XP/2003 that was unfortunately turned off by default. As a result back in the early 2000’s third-party firewall products such as ZoneAlarm became a very popular way to security against attacks. With the explosion of mobile workers in the late 90’s more and more people were connecting their laptops directly to the internet without the benefit of protection of a corporate firewall. Firewalls have long been around for year protecting internal corporate networks from outside attackers (see image below). In this article I am going to talk about how you can use Group Policy to control the firewall that comes out of the box with Windows but first I want to give you a bit of history of the evolution of host based firewall in Windows.

Firewall blocking internet connection windows 7