I've had the reverse happen, where I had to configure my firewall to deny outgoing connections for Steelseries Engine. AFAIK it's the only way to prevent it from updating to Steelseries GG, which adds things like "Moments" and "Giveaways" but offers nothing new for configuring Steelseries hardware.
There's less need to jump through all these hoops if you have physical access to a PC with enabled USB ports. For example: you could boot from the USB device and access the local storage if it's not encrypted.
EDIT: I meant to say "if you have physical access without Bitlocker enabled". Bitlocker is protecting the contents of the storage, if you can bypass the lockscreen on a Bitlocker protected computer you've evaded this protection.
But this article is about bypassing Bitlocker, so that's not relevant. Also, if a system is unencrypted there are a multitude of ways to easily read the contents. That goes for any device or operating system.
