We all know that you can make changes in the Group Policies and disable some standard programs like Registry Editor or Task Manager to run. What if you want to disable other third party programs to run? You can do it by changing the access control lists (ACL) of the program on an NTFS partition. Here is how :
Note : This works only on NTFS partitions as only these partitions support advanced security features. You must have administrator credentials to follow these steps.
- Open a command prompt window. To do this, press the keyboard shortcut Windows logo key + R. In the Run dialog that pops up, type cmd and press Enter.
- Suppose you want to disable a program C:dummy.exe from being run, then type the following in the command prompt :
cacls c:dummy.exe /E /P Everyone:N
- Now if you try to run this program, you will get an access denied message as shown :
If you want to restore access back and enable the program to be able to run again, then give this command in the command prompt window :
cacls c:dummy.exe /E /R Everyone