Sandboxie is a great program designed for the Windows operating system to protect the computer from malicious programs and prevent them from making changes to system files. The application allows the user to run programs like browsers, PDFs, Word, Excel, or any other applications in a Sandbox environment.
Sandboxie helps users protect their computers from malicious software, rogue programs, Trojans, spyware, worms, viruses, and any threat that can damage the machine. It acts as a firewall between your computer and the program you are currently using, as threats get downloaded when you are online.
Sandboxie for Windows 11/10
How Sandboxie works
Sandboxing is a method of preventing any permanent damage to your system caused by malware, by denying them access to your real system by having the Sandbox pretend to be the real operating system. Sandboxie is somewhat different from the usual sandbox program since it does not virtualize everything. It virtualizes only the resources that are requested by the programs running inside the sandbox – like Files, Disk Devices, Registry Keys, Process and Thread objects, Driver objects, and objects used for Inter-process communication such as Named Pipes and Mailbox Objects, Events, Mutexs , Semaphores, Sections, and LPC Ports.
UPDATE: Sandboxie-Plus is a fork of Sandboxie designed to address various problems as well as adding improved functionality. Take a look at it too.
When you launch the application, it creates an isolated space and prevents programs from making permanent changes to the computer.
Users can configure the Sandboxie application according to their requirements and run multiple applications in a single program. The biggest threats for security-conscious computer users include botnets, destructive banking Trojans, and ransomware.
How to use Sandboxie
- Download Sandboxie and run the setup.exe file to install the application, the setup.exe will download few more files to complete the installation once done a Sandboxie Control window will pop up on the screen.
- Right-click on the Sandbox Default Box to launch the program in Sandboxie.
- You can go into All Programs, click on Sandboxie and make a shortcut on the desktop from “Run web browser sandboxed” or pin it to the Start screen or Start menu, Quick launch or Taskbar.
Why consider Sandboxie
- Secure Web browsing: Allows the user to surf the web in the Sandbox environment hence blocks any malicious program to get downloaded when you are online.
- Provides Protective Shield over Email: We receive numerous emails in a day many are spam, few are useful those emails contain an attachment that might contain a virus or malicious software. Sandboxie application prevents those file to get downloaded on the computer and infect the computer
- Provides Enhanced Privacy: When we surf, all information like web cookies, browser cache are stored on the computer which can be easily seen by hackers, so when the web-browser runs in the Sandbox environment it saves those data inside the application itself hence prevent those cache files from getting downloaded on the machine.
- Prevention from Wear and Tear: As Sandboxie runs the application in a shield; hence, it prevents the malicious program to get installed on the computer.
Sandboxie download
Sandboxie was acquired by Sophos. They have now announced that they are making Sandboxie a free tool, with plans to transition it to an open-source tool. Until the open-source transition is completed, they have decided to make all restricted features of Sandboxie completely free. It is available for download on Github.com.
It works on all Windows, including Windows 11/10. Here are some more free Sandboxing software that may interest you.
