Stop Windows Spying with one click Firewall

now we all know that the latest version of Windows buys on you and I've made several videos talking about this a great example would be scorecard research a third-party market research company that your computer connects to every time you open your browser literally if I open a new tab we are connecting to scorecard research so they can study my internet Behavior we have discussed several ways of preventing this from happening but recently I came across an amazing firewall that does this by default the moment you set it up and that is called portmaster it's a very easy oneclick solution to not only Windows buying but all kinds of AD tracking getting a private DNS as well as a lot of other capabilities for instance if we look at the connections blocked as you can see there are a ton of microsoft.com domains that are actually being actively restricted and if I open a new tab again and uh we refresh this list you're going to see scorecardresearch.com on the top of the block list and the thing I really liked about portmaster was the ease of setup which I think is a big barrier to entry for a lot of people for doing these things so I really want to talk about this and how easy it was to set this up when you install this application it's very simple install It'll ask you to reboot the computer but once that's done there is a quick setup and that's just going to ask you what kind of trackers you want to block so you can customize this to say you want to block ad trackers you want to block malware you want to block deception which I recommend you turn on cuz it includes things like fishing and you can also make it block not safe for work stuff and the nice thing about blocking all of this using a firewall as opposed to let's say a browser extension or the host file as we discussed earlier is that this is going to be systemwide so whether or not you're using using your browser it is going to work and the things are still going to be blocked so for example if I'm using a game client like Steam and that is connecting to an ad tracking service that's also going to be block if Microsoft is doing something in the background with its event service that I canot control that is still going to be blocked and also as many of you pointed out if Windows decides to override the host file within windows in order to connect to its tracking sites which by the way I haven't seen that happen but if that does happen in the future this should still work and of course a firewall application can do a lot more so here's a live graph of all the active and blocked connections it's kind of funny to see so many blocked connections as a baseline because normally this would indicate tremendous malicious activity but of course it's just Windows being windows but we can also see the countries we are connecting to so this is going to be great for figuring out if there's a Russian uh Rat on your system or something if you randomly see yourself connecting to Russia out of the blue well that could be a cause for concern we can also see a comprehensive view of the network activity the processes that are creating that activity and the exact IP address that they're connecting to so again this could be useful in isolating malware if you've got some kind of crypto Miner on your system you could notice that show up here connecting to some kind of remote IP but you can also tell all the applications you do have on your system that are making outbound connection so for example I have Discord I have Microsoft SharePoint gaming Services uh some of these are blocked because it's Telemetry you can also see Discord connects to spotify.com because Discord now of course shows you what's playing in Spotify so this is a great application if you want to explore how your computer connects to the internet what different applications are doing I wouldn't recommend it as a replacement for an A but more as a privacy and information tool but hey they have free versions so it's definitely worth checking out so for those of you who found my previous guides on how to restrict Microsoft spying too difficult to implement or not effective enough this is definitely worth considering so let me know your thoughts on portmaster in the comments below I'd love to hear what you think of it after you've tried it yourself and just to be clear they haven't sponsored me to make this video although I wouldn't mind it given I do like the application but this video is actually sponsored by crowd sack which is another amazing free community tool that anyone can use to protect themselves from getting hacked now a lot of you do ask how I protect my own system and a big part of it is by using intrusion prevention system making sure that my RDP ports are protected making sure if there's any kind of inbound attack it is going to get locked in one of my security engines and alerted this is thanks to the Community Edition of crowds SEC which protects you from various different scenarios various vulnerabilities if you're hosting anything on the internet you should definitely consider checking this out because it's an absolutely free tool that you can deploy on your windows or Linux system to stop backdoor attempts into your computer or your server setting it up is pretty easy Once you have it installed it's going to show up in your program files if you're doing this on Windows and then you have a tool called CS CLI and if you open the terminal here you can use the Cs CLI commands in order to interact with the crowds SEC console I can inspect a given scenario install or list them so we can go and say list Crow runs silently in the background so it isn't something that you have to actively engage with very much but if you do want to look up a specific IP know if it's malicious you can always check it out so for example this one has been doing SSH Brute Force attacks and if you have a bouncer engaged on your system it is going to protect you you from IPS like that trying to connect to your network they are building this as a community tool they want your engagement they want your involvement they even have their project on GitHub and it is something you can expand upon you can build on you can contribute to feel free to reach out to them but above all I hope you found the information in this video helpful please like and share it if you did don't forget to subscribe for more interesting cyber security content this is Leo thank you so much for watching and as always stay informed stay secure

Channel: The PC Security Channel

Views: 189,726

Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, anti malware, ransomware, trojan, virus, PUP, best antivirus, best internet security, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, best EDR, EDR, portmaster, windows spying, windows 11 spys on you, stop windows spying, stop microsoft spying, windows privacy tools

Id: h2Yh5ejR_i4

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 24 2023