Microsoft then added a host based firewall with the release of Windows XP/2003 that was unfortunately turned off by default. As a result back in the early 2000’s third-party firewall products such as ZoneAlarm became a very popular way to security against attacks. With the explosion of mobile workers in the late 90’s more and more people were connecting their laptops directly to the internet without the benefit of protection of a corporate firewall. Firewalls have long been around for year protecting internal corporate networks from outside attackers (see image below). In this article I am going to talk about how you can use Group Policy to control the firewall that comes out of the box with Windows but first I want to give you a bit of history of the evolution of host based firewall in Windows.
