Customizing Online Armor
Online Armor offers several layers of protection to help ensure your security and privacy. In addition to basic firewalling, Online Armor incorporates sophisticated protection by default to help ensure that any threats not detected by antivirus or anti-spyware software cannot circumvent your computer’s protection.
While Online Armor is designed to make this protection easy to use, we understand that some may need more simplified protection or wish to disable protection features that they feel are adequately covered by existing protection.
Other people may want to use all the protection features of Online Armor, but may wish to make it operate more silently.
Online Armor is made to accommodate all users, and this section will help you to customize Online Armor to suit these needs.
Note: Before disabling any protection features, please review the Key Features help pages to be sure that you understand what these features are for and what they do.
The following changes can be made from the Online Armor Control Panel. To open the Online Armor Control Panel, simply double click the blue and white shield icon in the system tray, next to the clock in the lower right-hand corner of your screen.
More detailed information can be found in the respective help pages for each protection feature.
Note: Relevant videos are at the bottom of this page, however it is recommended that you read the following text before making any changes.
If you want Online Armor to automatically configure itself for programs already installed on your computer, but not Allowed during the Safety Check Wizard, then you can use Learning mode. Learning mode will configure Online Armor to automatically Allow any program, and program behavior, seen while in Learning mode so that you only see pop-ups for new programs and behaviors.
If you want Online Armor to operate completely silently, you can simply close the Online Armor GUI interface by right-clicking the Online Armor tray icon, in the system tray next to the clock in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, and selecting “Close GUI Interface.” This will leave Online Armor completely operational, but Online Armor will not pop-up or notify you of any events and automatically block them instead.
The first thing you will want to do is to choose whether you want to use the Firewall in Standard mode or Advanced mode. Take time to review the Choose Your Mode help page for more information.
Also be sure to review the options in the Options under the Firewall tab to customize integration with the Program Guard, logging, notifications, and more.
If you have the same program in more than once place on your hard drive, you can change how the Firewall will treat each program in the Options under the Firewall tab:
- By selecting Check by Hash, the programs will be treated the same regardless of their location on the hard drive.
- By selecting Check by Hash and Path, the programs will be handled individually.
In addition to basic firewalling, Online Armor offers protection by default against threats that may go undetected by other security software and attempt to circumvent your computer’s protection.
Online Armor will pop-up when an Unknown program attempts to run on your computer and when it attempts to behave in a potentially malicious way.
- If you wish to change the way that Online Armor notifies you when a program running for the first time is automatically Trusted or blocked, select Programs from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel, go to the Options tab, and change the appropriate setting(s).
- If you do not wish to see pop-ups when Unknown programs try to run, you can disable this by selecting Programs from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel, going to the Options tab, and taking the check out of the box labeled “Prompt when running unknown programs.” Online Armor will then no longer pop-up when Unknown programs try to run but will still monitor Unknown programs (but not Trusted programs) for potentially malicious behavior and pop-up if such behavior is attempted. This will make Online Armor behave more like a traditional antivirus or anti-spyware program when it comes to identifying malicious programs.
- If you do not want Online Armor to pop-up for
Unknown programs or potentially
malicious behavior by Unknown programs, then you can disable the Program Guard
completely by selecting General from the main menu of the Online Armor Control
Panel and taking the check out of the box next to “Program Guard.”
Note: If you only want Online Armor to stop monitoring specific programs for potentially malicious behavior you can simply classify the programs as Trusted. See the Programs List section of the Programs help page for more information. - Online Armor detects keyloggers by how they behave. This functionality is similar to how the Program Guard monitors for potentially malicious behavior, but is a separate function that is more focused. Keyloggers are known to use tricks to silently sneak your personal information out through firewalls without raising any alerts. Disabling Key Logger detection is not recommended, but can be achieved by selecting “Key Loggers” from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel, going to the Options tab, and taking the check out of the box labeled “Enable Key Loggers detection.”
Online Armor helps to protect your system and your privacy by filtering malicious website objects and internet scams. By default Online Armor will notify you when your computer tries to load a dangerous website object, download a phishing email, or connect to a phishing website.
- If you do not want to see pop-ups for websites that try to load potentially malicious objects, select Web Sites from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel, go to the Options tab, and take the check out of the box labeled “Prompt when blocking content on unknown sites.” Online Armor will then automatically block web objects and replace them with a notification that will also allow you to un-block the object if you wish. You can disable this notification by taking the check out of the box labeled “Show in web browser when content is silently blocked.”
- If you do not want Online Armor to filter dangerous web objects or phishing websites at all, you can disable the Web Shield by selecting General from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel and taking the check out of the box labeled “Web Shield.”
- If you do not want Online Armor to filter email for phishing emails, you can disable the Mail Shield by selecting General from the main menu of the Online Armor Control Panel and taking the check out of the box labeled “Mail Shield.”
- Automatically allow trusted programs to access the internet (Video)
- Display a small popup when trusted programs are allowed access (Video)
- Show or hide the firewall activity in the system tray (Video)
- Show me how to turn off learning mode (Video)
- Show me how to turn on learning mode (Video)
- Don't display popups when surfing the web (Video)
- Automatically allow trusted programs to access the internet (Video)
- Display a small popup when trusted programs are allowed access (Video)
- Show or hide the firewall activity in the system tray (Video)
- Show me how to TRUST a program (Video)
- Show me how to stop popups from websites (Video)
- Show me an example of blocking undesirable content (Video)