Wouldn’t it be terrific if, following a mistake which led to malware making its way on to your computer, you could wave a magic wand, utter the words – “get thee gone” – and, quick as you like – no more malware infection?
Luckily, you can do just that. You don’t have to be a mage or a magician – you don’t have to deliver a magic enchantment – but, you do need to be running a sandbox based isolation application.
And that, brings me to Sandboxie (last updated December 16, 2012) – the King of isolation applications in Geek territory. Rather than geek you into the land of nod – today’s review is what I like to refer to as a “soft review”.
Simply put, Sandboxie, when active, creates a virtual environment (of a sort), on a computer by redirecting all system and application changes, to an unused location on a Hard Drive. These changes can be permanently saved to disk or, completely discarded.
A case in point for isolating web surfing:
While surfing the Net, an inexperienced user mistakenly accepts an invitation to install a scareware application but realizes, after the fact, that this is a scam. Operating in a “real” environment, the damage, unfortunately, would already have been done.
Operating in an isolated environment with Sandboxie active; the system changes made by this parasite could be completely discarded – since the attack occurred in a – “I’m not really here” environment .
An obvious part of reviewing an application is, providing a technical breakdown of just how an application gets the job done – or, in some cases how/why an application doesn’t quite get it done.
It’s not often that I get caught between the proverbial “rock and a hard place” in terms of illustrating an application’s aptitude in getting the task accomplished. In this case however, Ronen Tzur, Sandboxie’s developer, has taken the expression – a picture is worth a thousand words – and definitely run with it.
From the site: Introducing Sandboxie
Sandboxie runs your programs in an isolated space which prevents them from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer.
The red arrows indicate changes flowing from a running program into your computer. The box labeled Hard disk (no sandbox) shows changes by a program running normally.
The box labeled Hard disk (with sandbox) shows changes by a program running under Sandboxie. The animation illustrates that Sandboxie is able to intercept the changes and isolate them within a sandbox, depicted as a yellow rectangle. It also illustrates that grouping the changes together makes it easy to delete all of them at once.
Fast facts:
Secure Web Browsing: Running your Web browser under the protection of Sandboxie means that all malicious software downloaded by the browser is trapped in the sandbox and can be discarded trivially.
Enhanced Privacy: Browsing history, cookies, and cached temporary files collected while Web browsing stay in the sandbox and don’t leak into Windows.
Secure E-mail: Viruses and other malicious software that might be hiding in your email can’t break out of the sandbox and can’t infect your real system.
Windows Stays Lean: Prevent wear-and-tear in Windows by installing software into an isolated sandbox.
The developer has provided a clear and concise Getting Started tutorial – which includes:
How to to use Sandboxie to run your applications.
How the changes are trapped in the sandbox.
How to recover important files and documents out of the sandbox.
How to delete the sandbox.
System requirements: Windows XP, Vista, Win 7 (32 and 64 bit), Win 8 (32 and 64 bit).
Available languages: English, Albanian, Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian.
Download at: Sandboxie
A Caveat: You may run with Sandboxie free of charge – but, once past the initial 30 days, you will be reminded that a lifetime licensed version is available for € 29 (approximately $38 USD at today’s conversion rate).
Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 