Reputation-based protection, found under App & browser control in Windows Security, governs Microsoft Defender SmartScreen ' s checks of applications, files, and websites based on their reputation before they are permitted to run or be downloaded. It is designed to block or warn about untrusted or malicious code and content, not to restrict which already-installed, already-trusted applications are permitted to modify files inside specific designated folders. Limiting write access to protected folders so that only explicitly approved applications can modify their contents is the specific job of Controlled folder access, which is configured under Virus & threat protection, Ransomware protection, and lets an administrator add trusted applications to an allowed list while blocking every other process from writing to the protected folders. Because Reputation-based protection addresses a fundamentally different threat model, evaluating whether software should be allowed to execute at all rather than whether an already-running application can write to a specific folder, configuring it does not achieve the goal of restricting folder modification to specific applications, so this solution does not meet the goal.