I know many people who put their full trust on their Anti-Virus program. Sometimes Antivirus scanner reports that a program is infected with a Virus or Trojan, even when the program is not really infected with any malicious code. This kind of problem is known as “False Positive” or “False Alert“. I can’t blame people who accuse a program as virus whenever their antivirus reports a legitimate program as virus because they are not geeks who know how to test and see what the program does to their computer.

Few months ago I learned about a program that is able to create a virtual space in which the untrusted programs can safely run. Usually when you accidentally run a virus, it will start spreading and modify your system. But in this case, if I run the virus in the virtual space, it won’t affect your system at all and I know what it CAN do to my system.

I hope that after you’ve finished reading this article, you will no longer have worries running untrusted programs.

The program that I found is called Sandboxie.

Here’s a great explanation on what Sandboxie is; taken from Sandboxie’s FAQ.

Think of your PC as a piece of paper. Every program you run writes on the paper. When you run your browser, it writes on the paper about every site you visited. And any malware you come across will usually try to write itself into the paper.

Traditional privacy and anti-malware software try to locate and erase any writings they think you wouldn’t want on the paper. Most of the times they get it right. But first the makers of these solutions must teach the solution what to look for on the paper, and also how to erase it safely.

On the other hand, the Sandboxie sandbox works like a transparency layer placed over the paper. Programs write on the transparency layer and to them it looks like the real paper. When you delete the sandbox, it’s like removing the transparency layer, the unchanged, real paper is revealed.

Sandboxie is free but if you use Sandboxie for more than 30 days, the software will “occasionally” remind you to consider paying the registration fee. By paying US$25, you get a life time registered version of Sandboxie. In the registered version, Sandboxie can be configured to issue a warning SBOX1118 whenever a particular program is launched outside the sandbox. You can also configure Sandboxie to automatically sandbox particular programs, even when they are not launched explicitly through Sandboxie.

The easiest way to run an untrusted program in Sandboxie is to use your mouse and right click on the program and select “Run Sandboxed“.

After the untrusted program is sandboxed, you can view the contents of the untrusted program. To view the contents of Sandbox, click on Function at the menu bar, select Contents of Sandbox and finally select Explore Contents.

As usual, popular and useful programs will somehow have serial, crack, or keygenerator. Team EMBRACE has created a keygenerator for Sandboxie. Considering what Sandboxie can help you and also the low price, it’s worth to buy and support Ronen Tzur, the author of Sandboxie.

If Sandboxie is still too advanced for you to use, then here’s what you need to do. Install and use Kaspersky AntiVirus 7 (KAV7). Kaspersky AntiVirus 7 has started to use a sandbox and as one could expect, it is much better than any of the other AntiVirus sandboxes. I got this information from a very good Trojan programmer. Although he claims to find one way to bypass the Sandbox, but at least with a sandbox, you’ll have a lower chance of getting infected by virus, trojan or worm. Remember, there is no 100% way to protect your computer. A FBI once said, the most secured computer is a computer that is turned off, lock it, bury it six feet underground… and he’s not even sure about that!

Oh, by the way, ZoneAlarm is also beta testing their new sandbox product called ZoneAlarm ForceField. It can protect you by creating a virtual “you” on any PC, anywhere, anytime.

[ Download Sandboxie v3.0.1 ]

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