Vista Tips - Enabling the outbound firewall

In Windows Vista, Microsoft decided it was best to disable the outbound connection filtering because it can cause headaches for many inexperienced computer users. This may have been the right choice but not filtering your outbound traffic can increase the possibility that an application can steal important personal information and send it to a remote computer. If this application is malicious, it can be used to steal personal information such as passwords and bank account numbers.
Turning on the outbound firewall filtering and enabling only the rules that grant your normal applications access to the Internet will greatly increase the security of your computer.

Enabling the outbound firewall rules on your computer is easy to do once you know where Microsoft hid the setting.

Follow these steps to turn the outbound firewall back on:

1. If the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security window is not already open, click the Start button, type wf.msc in the Search box, and then press Enter.
2. When the firewall configuration tool is loaded, click Windows Firewall Properties right in the middle of the opening screen.
3. When the settings window loads, you will see a tab for each of the different firewall profiles. Select the tab for the profile on which you would like to enable outbound filtering.
4. Under the State section, locate the Outbound connections drop-down box and change it to Block.
5. Click OK when you are finished to activate the outbound firewall on the profile you specified.

Windows automatically detects any applications that try to access the Internet or other network resources that are now blocked with the outbound firewall turned on and will prompt you to automatically authorize the application to send information out to the Internet.