Windows Security Warning – How to Disable ‘These Files Might Be Harmful’ Warning

networkingwindowswindows-explorer

I keep getting this irritating warning when copying files over the network:

These files might be harmful to your computer

These files might be harmful to your computer

Your internet security settings suggest that one or more files may be harmful. Do you want to use it anyway?

I am copying a file from \\192.168.0.197\c$ (home server) to my local machine which is at \\192.168.0.4.

How do I turn off this meaningless "warning"?

Best Answer

I found a fix by changing "internet options" -- so I guess Windows is detecting the "internet" as my own network.. sigh.

  • Click Start / Control Panel / Internet Options
  • Click Security tab.
  • Click Local Intranet
  • Click Sites button.
  • Click Advanced button.
  • Enter the IP Address of the other machine or server (wildcards are allowed) and click Add
  • Click Close, then OK, then OK again.
  • Disconnect, and reconnect the network drive

Changing Internet Options screenshot

This worked for me, but it's a bummer I have to manually enter IPs here.. it would be nice if Windows could detect this is a local network file copy and skip the irritating (and pointless) warning about "dangerous" files.

Sidenotes:

  • If you are using a DNS name to map the network drive, adding the IP address of the server to the zone will not work. You will need to add the DNS name, and vica-versa.
  • When adding an IP address, you can use wildcards like so: 192.168.1.*
  • Whan adding a DNS name, you can use wildcards like so: *.example.com
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