Windows is pretty good at defending itself from tax these days or attempts to be and if Windows doesn’t think an executable is safe then the defender smart screen protection will kick in, that will automatically mark the download as blocked, and you will get a dialogue similar to this appear on your screen:
Why the pop up?
This is simply telling you, the publisher does not have a science certificate on the application and smart screen is trying to protect your computer from what could be a malicious bit of software, notice here you get the run anyway option and don’t run.
If this option is set, you will probably only see the do not run option here as below, this is because Group policy has removed the run button:
Security : Protecting You
Domain GPO Override
If you are in a domain configuration where you get a group policy template that changes the behavior of this dialog box - this group policy setting will be defined as defender, smart screen explorer a policy as below:
If this option is set, you will probably only see the do not run option here as below, this is because Group policy has removed the run button:
Security : Protecting You
While this group policy was put in with good intentions to protect you from executing software that has malicious content, it seems to now be hindering your progress, But please don’t be too quick to remove this from Group policy and compromise the security of the server, that could backfire later down the road When this particular Protection could’ve saved the company from malicious activity, but it was recently disabled to install a bit of software.
I just want to install the software!
The problem here is that now you can’t run the software because it’s missing a signature and that means you’re not able to install the software, however, in the example I came across, I wasn’t getting this error. I was getting an error to say it couldn’t talk to the Internet to verify the file as below:
Smartscreen needs to be able to talk to the Internet to verify driver signatures and certificates, which means if you don’t have an Internet connection and you have the group policy set, you will not be able to install the majority of the software that smart screen tries to check.
Once you have clicked the unblocked button, you should be able to run the software without the dialog box, however, you may notice that it’s not a button and more a tick box, if that is the case, put a tick in the box and click apply and then OK
Smartscreen needs to be able to talk to the Internet to verify driver signatures and certificates, which means if you don’t have an Internet connection and you have the group policy set, you will not be able to install the majority of the software that smart screen tries to check.
Remediate the problem with the unblock property
Actually, no this just means you need to make a modification to the properties of the file in order to install this application, To get to the properties dialogue, right click the file and choose properties and then towards the bottom of the dialog box you should see the option to unblock the file as below:
Once you have clicked the unblocked button, you should be able to run the software without the dialog box, however, you may notice that it’s not a button and more a tick box, if that is the case, put a tick in the box and click apply and then OK