Block New and Changed Applications

Is it advisable / necessary to Block New and Changed Applications? Are there any down-sides to using this feature?

 

I personally don't enable this feature as it can be a little irksome when it automatically blocks an exe from running.

If you leave it off it will simply ask you whether you want to permit/deny the exe from running and whether you want to make the action permanent or not.

 

I used it on my system because it meant my family didn't get popups which they couldn't answer. At first they complained of a couple of things that didn't work. A quick look at the logs, a couple of permissions modified and back up and running. I liked it too because I didn't want to get bothered with alerts.

 

thank you for the prompt answers.

 

Blocks everything. Get a PC exactly how you want it, and lock it like that.

It will block Automatic Updates, but also blocks attacks related to most if not all vulnerabilities anyway. Arguably, the worst type of attack is a self spreading trojan riding on a new unpatched vulnerability. BLASTER did this and is blocked automatically by this setting because new code cannot execute. Self spreading malware is now literally, everywhere ! so unpatched isn't so bad with this setting.

There is NO way I am saying not to patch. Patch when MS releases them (since they batch them all together now anyway). This should be done with PG disabled anyway since if you can't trust MS, you can't trust the OS you're using !

 

Does "block new and changed applications" alert you if it has blocked something? That is if I change the settings in a program will PG give me an alert or silently block the program if I change or update it? I would like to be alerted so I could allow the changes.

 

On my system, with block new and changed ticked, then I get no alert if an execution is blocked (you need to check the log to see these blocked events) but the PG icon changes colour from blue to red if a global hook, access physical memory etc is blocked.

When the block new and changed is unticked, I get a popup alert for all events (assuming those events are not already allowed on the security or protection tabs).

 

Thanks, I have the block new and changed applications now enabled in PG. I will have to check the logs to make sure no other security applications are blocked. I updated KAV which I do when I first log ont he Internet and then ran a quick scan. I looked at the log and there was no listing that KAV was allowed. UnhackMe which scans every minute shows up in the log file as allowed. I wonder why KAV doesn't show up in the log at all.