A method and system for locking down a local machine zone associated with a network browser is provided. Placing the local machine zone in a lockdown mode provides stricter security settings that are applied to active content attempting to publish within a local page open in the network browser. The stricter setting are provided in a new set of registry keys that correspond to the lockdown mode of the local machine zone. The original security settings remain unchanged so that other systems and applications functionality that depends on the original security settings remains unaffected for the local machine zone. A user may also selectively allow active content to render despite the local machine zone being locked down.