Next is Sandboxie, or SandboxIE, which is an excellent sandbox 2
that I recommend for Windows. It is shareware software. 3
The free version is missing a few features 4
which are available in the paid version. 5
And after 30 days of use, the free version 6
displays reminders to upgrade you 7
to the paid version, but remains functional. 8
The missing functionality is to automatically 9
run programs under Sandboxie even when they are 10
not started directly through Sandboxie. 11
This could be quite a useful function 12
and maybe you might need it. 13
Programs can be forced by name or by containing folder. 14
Another missing feature is running programs 15
in more than one sandbox at the same time, 16
which again could be useful. Prices are here. 17
Sandboxie is very simple to use out of the box, 18
but if you want to get the most out of it, 19
you will need to spend a little time configuring it 20
and working out what features they offer 21
so you can configure it to use it in the way you need. 22
Just download it as normal and install it. 23
It’s your usual, simple Windows install. 24
Or you can use Choco to install it. 25
Let’s do a search here for Sandboxie. 26
So you can see these two versions. One that actually installs. 27
It’s installing. 28
Downloading. 29
And there we go. Installed. And there it is. 30
And that’s what it looks like. And immediately 31
is popping up asking me if I want to apply 32
the configuration settings which will improve 33
compatibility with these applications. 34
So you can see here it’s the Windows and Office licensing service. 35
So you’d either have to look into that as to whether or not 36
that’s something you want it to do or not. 37
But yes, it’s okay. 38
I’ll give you some tips on Sandboxie. 39
If you see in the bottom right here, the sandbox icon is there. 40
You can right-click on here. And if you go up here, 41
this will show you here the sandboxes that you have. 42
At the moment, it’s just the default sandbox 43
which comes when you install it. 44
If you go up here, you can run each of these within a sandbox. 45
Your default web browser, email reader, 46
you can launch any program through the sandbox, 47
or through the start menu, or through Windows Explorer. 48
The way I tend to run things is just by right-clicking 49
and then run Sandboxed, 50
and then it will give you a choice of which sandbox you want to use. 51
You have different settings per sandbox. 52
So I can choose here the default sandbox, or to run outside the sandbox. 53
Obviously I want to run it as the default sandbox 54
and I don’t want to run it as administrator. 55
So there, Firefox has started within the default sandbox. 56
And you can tell it’s in the sandbox 57
because you can see this yellow box around it. 58
So now that is protected by the default sandbox, 59
and you can see this icon is changed. 60
It’s got some red dots on it because the sandbox is in use. 61
If I right-click on here again, go to Show Window, 62
this here is the sandbox, 63
and you can see what’s running within the sandbox. 64
And there obviously you can see that Firefox is there 65
and the accompanying processes that sandbox itself requires. 66
Now, I can configure this default sandbox 67
or the sandboxes that I want to use. 68
I go here, Sandbox Settings. 69
Make sure these two are ticked so that you can see a border 70
around the windows because what you can do is 71
accidentally think you're running something in sandbox and you're not. 72
So it’s always useful to have a yellow border around it. 73
Go to Recovery. 74
When you close your sandbox or the browser in this case, 75
it will delete content or ask you if you want to delete 76
content that you may have downloaded in this folder here. 77
But what’s set up automatically is what’s called Immediate Recovery. 78
Now let me show you what Immediate Recover is, 79
and it is quite useful. So, let’s go here. 80
So I’m choosing to download the file here just to demonstrate. 81
I’m choosing the file SDelete because we are going to use that later. 82
So let’s download that, save it, 83
and then this is what comes up. 84
This is because we’ve got immediate recovery set. 85
So instead of storing this within the sandbox straight away, 86
what it does is it says, “Do you want to store it in the sandbox, 87
or do we want to immediate recover it out of the sandbox 88
and put it within the real file system?” 89
So we can recover it here if we want. 90
We can recover and explore. We can recover and run. 91
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to close it here, 92
and this means it’ll be saved to the sandbox 93
and not the real file system. 94
So on the View, Files and Folders, 95
we can see there it is downloaded, 96
SDelete.zip in the Downloads folder. 97
Now, if you look in the Downloads folder, it isn’t there. 98
Actually it is there. This is a version I downloaded previously, 99
but the version I've just downloaded isn’t there 100
and because that is a zip file. 101
So the SD zip file isn’t here. 102
It isn’t in the Downloads folder. 103
Now, if I was to run Explorer, sandboxed, 104
with the default sandbox, the Explorer would 105
be able to see what is in the sandbox. 106
So, if I go in Downloads here, there we can see 107
the SDelete that is within the default sandbox. 108
And you can see here this is yellow. 109
Close that. I go back here, and you can see 110
it isn’t there when you're not sandboxed. 111
So let’s go back to our Options. Default, Sandbox Settings. 112
So there’s our Recovery options. This is set for 113
the Immediate Recovery. But you don’t 114
necessarily have that set. 115
You can choose at the end what you want to do 116
with the files that have gone into the sandbox. 117
Now Delete. 118
It’s usually a good idea to automatically 119
delete the contents of your sandbox 120
when the sandbox is closed or the application 121
that you’ve launched with the sandbox is closed. 122
So I usually add this set. 123
And then you’ve got the choice of Delete Command. 124
So you can securely delete or write 125
with random data or zeros and ones 126
over the content that’s in the sandbox, 127
and that’s a good idea. 128
So you want to use SDelete or Easer if you like. 129
So let me show you how you would do that. 130
Select SDelete, and we know where we’ve put that. 131
This is what I downloaded before. And there what you can see, 132
is it creates a special command so that when it deletes, 133
it deletes securely, or rather, it deletes multiple times. 134
This is three passes. 135
You can get both Eraser and SDelete with Choco if you want to, 136
as an example. So that’s installed. 137
And that will install Eraser. 138
So back to Sandboxie. 139
You can force processes or applications to run from a specific folder. 140
That could be quite useful with things like autoruns. 141
Now only for registered versions, paid for versions, 142
can you force particular programs to run. 143
This is a useful feature. So for example, 144
your browser, your mail client would be good to add here 145
so that it’s always run sandbox 146
and you don’t forget to run it sandboxed. 147
These programs will be automatically terminated 148
if they are still executing in the sandbox 149
after all the other programs have ended. 150
This is the amount of space that the sandbox has 151
in order to store downloaded files. 152
48 MB isn’t particularly much. I always increase 153
this to about 4 GB so I've got a fair bit of space. 154
But I don’t always have it on Immediate Recovery. 155
So I need to space in order to download the files 156
and then make a decision on what I'm keeping. 157
Restrictions here: you can prevent 158
programs from accessing the internet, 159
allow or deny programs to start and run, 160
and you can drop the rights if you're running as administrator. 161
You shouldn’t be running as an administrator, 162
but select that anyway just in case that happens. 163
Access restrictions: so if it’s a files, 164
registry access, IPC, Windows access, COM, you can specify 165
the sort of access that you want to allow the sandbox to have. 166
So, do you want to give any programs 167
full access, read access, write access? 168
Do you want to block anything in particular? 169
Generally, you want to give as little access as possible. 170
And then there’s Specific Application Settings that you can make. 171
So here we’ve got Firefox. 172
This is allowing a direct access to the phishing databases. 173
That can be okay for security. 174
And perhaps you want to keep cookies, 175
so you may have – so instead of 176
the sandbox being unable to access the cookies, 177
you may want to add the access there. 178
And then Specific Settings for various different Email Clients. 179
So there you go, that’s Sandboxie. 180
If you're using Windows, there’s no reason 181
really why you shouldn’t be using Sandboxie 182
or some other sandbox alternative in order to 183
give you that extra layer of sandbox protection. 184
This is a good document that I recommend. 185
It goes through using Sandboxie with 186
your browser and an email client. 187
So check that out, go through it 188
if you want to set up Sandboxie 189
with a browser or Firefox and your email client. 190
I’d also recommend the Sandboxie forums. 191
That way you can find quite a lot of information, 192
and if you’ve got any particular questions, 193
it is a good, responsive forum.