Following this topic (Thanks @crossroads !) This is for Windows Defender on Windows 11. Following a recommendation from someone on PG forums, I already applied “Windows Spy Blocker” basic rules. But I stumbled upon many “Allow” rules and I wonder if I can delete them or will this break stuff? For…

You can use it as a complete replacement for Windows Defender but it does not replace it in the sense that it does not remove or override anything related to Windows Defender. Simplewall acts as a GUI to configure Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) which is already built into Windows. When you first …

This is what it looks like: [image]

Pinging @Average_Joe as I know you’ve been playing with Firewalls in the last few months. Would you or someone else know?

In my experience, you should not delete these rules. Rather, switch the Action from Allow to Deny in order to block the connection. If your threat model allows for it, I find it personally more useful to go with a third party firewall solution where you can whitelist applications and connections ra…

In my experience, you should not delete these rules. Rather, switch the Action from Allow to Deny in order to block the connection. This is correct. Usually the outbound default action is to allow, so deleting outbound allow rules has no effect and you would need to deny the traffic explicitly fo…

[image] lyricism: This can be done easily with the built-in firewall too. Just change the default outbound action to deny. I’m assuming if I do that to all the rules in the image above, it would break my computer lol. If I already applied the ‘Windows Spy Blocker’ basic rules, are those enou…

[image] win11.shading291: I’m assuming if I do that to all the rules in the image above, it would break my computer lol. Well, no. It would if you changed the default outbound action to deny and disabled those rules (without replacing them with rules you define, at least), but those are two d…

Sorry, I only understand the basics of a Firewall and its purpose, please do educate me on specifics :stuck_out_tongue: My default connection is indeed set to “Outbound connections that do not match a rule are allowed”. If that’s the case, why are there so many “allow” rules in my outbound connect…

They more or less exist to prevent breaking basic network functionality in the event you did switch the default outbound action to deny. They are defaults that most people (or at least Microsoft, in some cases) will always want allowed. You can/should definitely turn off anything you don’t need if y…

Aaaaaah ok I get it now. My goal is to remove as much Telemetry as possible. What would be your recommendation?

You can try a strict allowlist where only certain programs are allowed to establish connections but even that’s not 100% and could have varying degrees of success for the purpose of preventing telemetry. If that sounds like overkill and you’d prefer to only deny telemetry connections, I’d really rec…

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Firewall Outbound rules

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win11.shading291 June 22, 2025, 5:48pm 14

I’d love this. Would SimpleWall do what you said?

I hope so, because it seems to be the only one truly recommended here:

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