Windows – How to Cut Off Steam from the Internet

blockingfirewallsteamwindows 7

I want to disable internet connection for Steam in Windows 7. How can I do this? (Steam offline mode is not an option for me)

After change firewall rules, Steam is automatically adding his own firewall rule, for private and public connections. With both, allowing and blocking rule on the list, firewall is allowing Steam to connect.

Is there any other way to block internet connection for application in Windows?

I dont want to install any other firewalls. It would be great to enable and disable this connection via command line.

Best Answer

You can use the Windows hosts file to redirect any requests to the Steam service to your local machine (localhost or 127.0.0.1). Those requests will be going straight into the void and Steam will not have any way to work around this issue, except for changing the servers they connect to (which you can block then, as well).

You can find out which servers to block using Wireshark, or you can just google and try to find a list of Steam service IPs.

This list may be useful.

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Windows firewall blocks outbound connection that is allowed by a rule

After asking for help in the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) forum on MSDN I learned that you can capture the activity of WFP (which the firewall employs) using the following commands:

netsh wfp capture start
netsh wfp capture stop

The resulting log file is XML which makes it human readable and from that file I learned that wermgr.exe is blocked by the rule WSH Default Outbound Block with the description Blocks all outbound traffic for services who have been network hardened. Apparently, this rule takes precedence over my "allow" rule.

I'm not sure exactly why wermgr.exe is affected by the Windows Service Hardening default rule but I assume that one of the hardened services execute wermgr.exe to perform a task of connecting to the server at 65.55.53.190 (a Microsoft IP address), and wermgr.exe is then blocked just as the service would be.

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To solve this, you need one of two options:

Use %APPDATA%\Roaming\Spotify\Spotify.exe OR
Use C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Spotify\Spotify.exe

As well, you might want to block the SpotifyWebHelper.exe application for incoming traffic which might be also used for P2P.

Best Answer

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