Changing firewall settings

Yes it is normal for Win 8 & 8.1 as they changed the way on how Firewalls work on the system and other AV's just duplicate what the OS Firewall does but WSA will still block any malware from calling out and with Windows Firewall must be on and you can set it as you like in there.
 
HTH,
 
Daniel 😉

Hi Petr,
 
That's correct Windows Firewall on Windows 8 & 8.1 is very good and they limited how other Firewalls work on it so WSA will Block malware from calling out. Here are a couple Quotes from JoeJ VP Endpoint Solutions Engineering!
 
"Exactly, the firewall in Windows 8 is much easier to work with than previous platforms because of the built in OS controls. Every vendor needs to use the same APIs now (the older methods are deprecated), but that's exactly why we aren't doing it currently - no matter what vendor wraps the APIs, it will be exactly the same underlying calls which are built into the OS, and you can use the OS UI to do the same job if you want to customize it."
 
"WSA's protection abilities are just as strong as they are on other OSs - it is the custom management of individual applications which is different in this case, a technical feature which isn't required (and the OS duplicates the same functionality).The reason why we have the functionality on Windows 7 and not Windows 8 is because Microsoft doesn't expose the same normalized interfaces on Windows 7 (or require vendors to use the new APIs)."
 
Also see here: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Ideas-Exchange/Outbound-connections-fw-control-in-Win-8-Win-8-1/idi-p/60003#.UwIu4oXDtdU
 
HTH,
 
Daniel 😉