Windows Firewall Disable
Marin Brickle
Besides knowing the difference, in my case I want to diminish the system vulnerability to exploits by keeping open only the minimal ports that I need. For that, would it make a difference if I use block or disable?
So for example you can have a block rule that is preventing traffic, but you may want to temporarily allow that traffic for testing or other purposes, so you can select that rule and then disable it. Then if you want to reactivate the rule you can enable it again.
Have a client with several remote locations, no domain/DC, and on networks that we don't support(state-owned and administrated network/firewall). We need to permanently disable the windows firewalls on our supported machines at at least one site, but I'm not sure of the best way to do this where windows update won't just turn them back on. I thought that turning off the firewall and disabling its service would do the trick, but I'm reading that this can cause windows update to stop working...which makes absolutely no sense but also wouldn't surprise me. Any suggestions?
And my second question is, does AzureAD provide group policy as well? We considered going with cloud-hosted GP but so far I've only found a few third-party options, PolicyPak appearing to be the frontrunner but not having SMB friendly pricing with their 100 computer minimum which took that option off the table(unless we can get all of the sites for this client covered which will take time assuming we get them to approve the purchase).
Although it's not technically "disabling" the firewall, you can set it to allow all traffic. Go to Settings, Network and Internet, Windows Firewall, Advanced Settings. Right click on "Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security" and click Properties.
I would think that using local group policy to configure Firewall settings would be an option without being in a domain environment. Of course that would mean touching each machine though which would not be very efficient. If you do have an Azure Tenant, you can Azure join the devices and push policy that way. Another option is to use provisioning packages if they are windows 10 devices I am sure you can configure firewall settings with them. But this would still require touching them all.
From what I've seen Microsoft say on Azure GP...it doesn't work for on-prem machines, only their Azure domain joined VMs. The only option we have for centralized GP management of those on-prem non-domain machines would be PolicyPak, but this particular site only has 14 machines and we have less than 100 total across all sites...and they have a 100pc minimum which runs $2500/annually. If they came down in price or got rid of that 100pc minimum it would be a more reasonable option.
I considered the local GP route, but Microsoft's official stance there as of 2 years ago is "we can't guarantee our updates won't undo your changes for local/domain GP settings on each machine unless you pay for W10 enterprise subscription for actual full administrative control over your W10 devices." The sysadmin sub over on Reddit was on fire over this a couple years ago because anything you configured in local/domain gp would be undone on your devices each time a feature update came out, so things like windows app removal would be reversed and Candy Crush would show right back up in everyone's start menu, and M$ told us to buy enterprise if we wanted any guarantee that those changes would stay in place.
If I turn it off via local machine group policy, in theory any windows update could randomly undo that GP setting at any time. Microsoft's official position on that is if I don't like that, buy enterprise.
Even disabling Mcafee firewall blocks enabling windows firewall though might work after a reboot. Really I used to see when you tried to uninstall mcafee via add/remove programs or program features in control panel a list pops up giving you a choice of what to uninstall.This might only happen f custom install was used to install Mcafee.
It (Home Sharing) seems to show up about a second or two after disabling the firewall. It never seems to last, though. Sooner or later Home Sharing goes away and I need to cycle the power on the Apple devices to get it to work again (for a short while).
I stumbled upon this error the other week at a customer. They had problems running GPRESULT on remote machines with SEP 12.1. All their machines have NTP enabled so it was easy for them to first blame that. To my knowledge NTP doesn't deny that kind of traffic. I tried to disable NTP without result. When clicking around a bit I found that Windows Firewall seemed to be enabled although we'd disabled it through SEP policy.
When I disable Windows Firewall through the Advanced Firewall Settings I suddenly can do all sorts of GPRESULT on remote machines. Please note that we have made the settings in SEP Firewall Policy to Always Disable Windows Firewall.
Did some documenation digging - the article TECH123729 is right on one point = this is default and expected bahaviour for 12.1 in windows 7 and above - the reason for it is that Windows Firewall with Advanced Security do include the IPSec component - if you disable the Windows Firewall you are disabling IPSec as well - SEP is then not disabling the Firewall completely but only taking it over and leaving IPSec "on" and working.
I remember there where some complains on other 3rd party firewall software Forum that theirs Firewall disabled Windows Firewall completely and with this the IPSec Rules were not working any more. The current design in SEP prevents that from occuring.
On Windows 10, you can disable the Microsoft Defender Firewall in at least four ways through the Windows Security app, Control Panel, Command Prompt, and even PowerShell, and this guide will teach you how.
Yes, you can disable the firewall temporarily or permanently. You only have one choice when it comes to disabling this security feature. You should only disable the Microsoft Defender Firewall to troubleshoot problems or perform specific tasks. Otherwise, the feature should always be turned on.
Adversaries may disable or modify system firewalls in order to bypass controls limiting network usage. Changes could be disabling the entire mechanism as well as adding, deleting, or modifying particular rules. This can be done numerous ways depending on the operating system, including via command-line, editing Windows Registry keys, and Windows Control Panel.
Modifying or disabling a system firewall may enable adversary C2 communications, lateral movement, and/or data exfiltration that would otherwise not be allowed. For example, adversaries may add a new firewall rule for a well-known protocol (such as RDP) using a non-traditional and potentially less securitized port (i.e. Non-Standard Port).[1]
The "ZR" variant of BACKSPACE will check to see if known host-based firewalls are installed on the infected systems. BACKSPACE will attempt to establish a C2 channel, then will examine open windows to identify a pop-up from the firewall software and will simulate a mouse-click to allow the connection to proceed.[3]
Magic Hound has added the following rule to a victim's Windows firewall to allow RDP traffic - "netsh" advfirewall firewall add rule name="Terminal Server" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=3389.[22][23]
Monitor executed commands and arguments associated with disabling or the modification of system firewalls such as netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="file and printer sharing" new enable=Yes,ufw disable, and ufw logging off.
Monitor for changes in the status of the system firewall such as Windows Security Auditing events 5025 (The Windows firewall service has been stopped) and 5034 (The Windows firewall driver was stopped).
Monitor for changes made to firewall rules that might allow remote communication over protocols such as SMD and RDP. Modification of firewall rules might also consider opening local ports and services for different network profiles such as public and domain.
Monitor for changes made to windows Registry keys and/or values that adversaries might use to disable or modify System Firewall settings such as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SharedAccess\Parameters\FirewallPolicy.
I am attempting to create a script that will turn off the firewall notifications in Windows 7. We are now using Symantec which is handling the software firewall on our windows machines, but Windows does not recognize it as being turned on, so I am getting a ton of reports of errors popping up. The resolution for this is to simply turn off firewall notifcations, since it is a false alarm.
Thank you for reaching out to the live community. I understand you would like to run Windows defender firewall along side Cortex XDR firewall, however, to avoid performance issues, Palo Alto Networks recommends that you disable or remove Windows Defender from endpoints and where the Cortex XDR agent is installed. There are also other potential performance issues with having both XDR and Defender running together on an endpoint as there will be conflicts. Thank you.
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