A Firewall is a very useful piece of software that monitors all incoming and outgoing network activity. By monitoring, you can set up rules and blocklists to filter network activity and ban any application or service from accessing the internet. Firewalls have always been a little difficult to configure and use. The main question always remains, how to block an application from accessing the internet. To answer this question, we’ve covered an awesome tool called SimpleWall that makes it super simple to setup your Firewall settings.
SimpleWall software for Windows PC
SimpleWall is not a firewall software; rather it uses Windows Filtering Platform under the hood. Which means, it is configuring the Windows Firewall with your settings behind the scenes.
Using SimpleWall is quite easy, first, you need to decide the mode you want to run this program in. Either you can run it in whitelist mode, which means only the application you select will be allowed to use the internet. Or you can run it in blacklist mode, which would block the applications that you’ve selected.
Adding applications to the program is simple, right click and then select Add. You can simply add files, running processes, packages, and services. SimpleWall displays a list of each of them so that it is simple to add applications to the program.
Once you’ve added the applications, you can click the checkbox corresponding to them to add them to relevant blocklist or whitelist. Once you are done adding the applications, just click on the Enable Filtering button to start. It is recommended to stop Windows Firewall if this program is going to be running, SimpleWall does come with an option to disable it automatically.
Once the filtering has been enabled, no application in the blocked list can access the internet. If any such application tries connecting to the internet, you will be notified with a small notification just above the system tray. The notification itself will give you a lot of information and provide buttons for relevant actions. You can allow an application from the notification or continue to block it. Or you may create an outbound rule for an IP address or port. And lastly, you can completely disable notifications for an app.
The application also comes with a purge option. Where you can set a purge timer and all the unused and invalid applications will be removed from SimpleWall after a given duration of time.
There are great import/export features available as well. You can export your application list and rules and later import them into a different or same computer. The import/export functionality can help you maintain a various set of configurations for different scenarios you might face daily. For instance, you can create one set of configuration when kids are using the computer and the other one when you are using.
Just like its name, the interface is also quite simple to use as well. It comes with various highlighting options to highlight different types of applications such as system, signed the application, windows service, etc. Moreover, you can enable other features such as Always on top, Load on system startup and Start minimized.
The application also maintains a log for dropped packages which can be accessed at a specified location. You can also enable notifications for dropped packages and finally, you can customize notification sound and its display timeout.
SimpleWall is a very simple firewall tool. If you want to block some applications from using the internet, you can quickly do that using SimpleWall. It is simple, convenient and gets the job done quickly. Additionally, the features such as notifications, purge timer, and system rules make this tool more preferable over its counterparts.
SimpleWall is completely free and open source. Click here at henrypp.org to download SimpleWall.
