Advanced options

In Advanced setup > Protections > Network access protection > Network attack protection > Advanced options, you can enable or disable detection of several types of attacks and exploits that may harm your computer.

Intrusion detection

Intrusion detection monitors the device network communication for malicious activity.

•Protocol SMB—Detects and blocks various security problems in the SMB protocol.

•Protocol RPC—Detects and blocks various CVEs in the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE).

•Protocol RDP—Detects and blocks various CVEs in the RDP protocol (see above).

•ARP Poisoning attack detection—Detection of ARP poisoning attacks triggered by man-in-the-middle attacks or detection of sniffing at the network switch. ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) is used by the network application or device to determine the Ethernet address.

•TCP/UDP Port Scanning attack detection—Detects attacks of port scanning software—application designed to probe a host for open ports by sending client requests to a range of port addresses to find active ports and exploit the vulnerability of the service. Read more about this type of attack in the glossary.

•Block unsafe address after attack detection—IP addresses detected as sources of attacks are added to the Blacklist to prevent connection for a certain time. You can define Blacklist retention period, which sets the time for how long the address will be blocked after attack detection.

•Notify about attack detection—Turns on the Windows notification area notification at the bottom right corner of the screen.

•Notify about incoming attacks against security holes—Alerts you if attacks against security holes are detected or if an attempt is made by a threat to enter the system this way.

Packet inspection

Packet analysis that filters data being transferred through the network.

•Allow incoming connection to admin shares in SMB protocol—The administrative shares (admin shares) are the default network shares that share hard drive partitions (C$, D$, ...) in the system together with the system folder (ADMIN$). Disabling connection to admin shares should mitigate many security risks. For example, the Conficker worm performs dictionary attacks to connect to admin shares.

•Deny old (unsupported) SMB dialects—Deny SMB sessions that use an old SMB dialect unsupported by IDS. Modern Windows operating systems support old SMB dialects due to backward compatibility with old operating systems such as Windows 95. The attacker can use an old dialect in an SMB session to evade traffic inspection. Deny old SMB dialects if your computer does not need to share files (or use SMB communication in general) with a computer with an old version of Windows.

•Deny SMB sessions without extended security—Extended security can be used during the SMB session negotiation to provide a more secure authentication mechanism than LAN Manager Challenge/Response (LM) authentication. The LM scheme is considered weak and is not recommended for use.

•Deny opening of executable files on a server outside the Trusted zone in SMB protocol—Drops connection when you are trying to open an executable file (.exe, .dll, ...) from a shared folder on the server that does not belong to the Trusted zone in the firewall. Note that copying executable files from trusted sources can be legitimate. However this detection should mitigate risks from the unwanted opening of a file on a malicious server (for example, a file opened by clicking a link to a shared malicious executable file).

•Deny NTLM authentication in SMB protocol for connecting a server inside or outside the Trusted zone—Protocols that use NTLM (both versions) authentication schemes are subject to a credentials forwarding attack (known as an SMB Relay attack in the case of the SMB protocol). Denying NTLM authentication with a server outside the Trusted zone should mitigate risks from forwarding credentials by a malicious server outside the Trusted zone. Similarly, you can deny NTLM authentication with servers in the Trusted zone.

•Allow communication with the Security Account Manager service—For more information about this service, see [MS-SAMR].

•Allow communication with the Local Security Authority service—For more information about this service, see [MS-LSAD] and [MS-LSAT].

•Allow communication with the Remote Registry service—For more information about this service, see [MS-RRP].

•Allow communication with the Service Control Manager service—For more information about this service, see [MS-SCMR].

•Allow communication with the Server service—For information about this service, see [MS-SRVS].

•Allow communication with the other services—Other MSRPC services. MSRPC is the Microsoft implementation of the DCE RPC mechanism. Moreover, MSRPC can use named pipes carried into the SMB (network file sharing) protocol for transport (ncacn_np transport). MSRPC services provide interfaces for accessing and managing windows systems remotely. Several security vulnerabilities have been discovered and exploited in the wild in the Windows MSRPC system (for example, Conficker worm, Sasser worm,…). Disable communication with MSRPC services that you do not need to provide to mitigate many security risks (such as remote code execution or service failure attacks).