SandboxIE - Another way to avoid spyware and malware

Sandboxie uses another approach to protect you from spyware and malware: fooling the browser, and those nasty applications that hijacks your browser that changes has been written on the disk while there are not.



To quote from its FAQ section, What is Sandboxie:

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.

I like it quite much, as it adds another sense of security to me. The only issue is that I have to remind myself to move the files I downloaded into the "sandboxed" environment to my real environment every now and then. Of course I won't throw away my anti-spyware applications, but with Sandboxie I feel a little bit safer.