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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

> The built in Windows Firewall does this. No need to pay for a 3rd party magic app.

I'm not a macOS user anymore, but when I was, Little Snitch did more than just block/allow all connections a program makes. You get a popup/window for each connection attempt, and can whitelist the process, domain, specific address, port and more.

Is this really how Windows Firewall works? Because I've used Windows for more than two decades, and I only remember a boolean "allow/disallow" based on the program itself, when it tries to make a connection, then you see nothing else unless you manually go and dig into the configuration/rules. Have I been missing out on something?

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Windows Firewall Control, now owned by Malwarebytes, adds notification on connection attempt as a feature, while leaving windows firewall running intact.

I've never been fully satisfied with software firewalls, but WFC comes close.

Weird, why does a search show this is from https://www.binisoft.org/wfc. How is this associated with Malwarebytes except the use of their name and logo? I would trust this a lot more if it was hosted by Malwarebytes and not a link on their forum https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/296798-malwarebytes-wi...

It is absolutely not how Windows work.

It absolutely is, if you take a moment to set it up. By default outgoing connections that don't match a rule are allowed. It's very easy to change the settings to disallow by default, and to set up rules based on "process, domain, specific address, port and more".

In Windows Defender Firewall settings right click Outbound Rules, click New Rule. Choose the type of rule (Program, Port, Predefined, Custom). You can apply the rule to a program / set of programs, a service or globally. You can apply it by protocol, port, IP, specific network interfaces etc. The only thing I can't find that was mentioned in GP is rules based on domain/address - I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the firewall or I'm just too dumb to find it.

You skipped the "you get a popup" part, which is an important and missing feature. Windows firewall only does popups for opening ports.

You'll get a popup to allow it, but it's on/off. But you can manually create rules for each .exe as well.

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