Sandboxie gives hard drives a clean slate

Yea, though I surf through the valley of Internet evil — those bytes where political radio talk show hosts blog — I shall fear no virus, for the purveyors of political putrescence are playing in a sandbox.

Technically, they’re playing in Sandboxie, a freely distributed bit of software that isolates your online session from the rest of your hard drive and wipes it clean when you close it out.
“It’s one of the only ways to really surf the Web safely,” says Bryant Harrison, owner of Quick Fix Computers in Albemarle County. “It’s easy to pick up a virus — or malware — at almost any legitimate site at any time because people are always trying to hack into it. They succeed on occasion, even if it’s for a very short time.”
Mr. Harrison and colleague Martin Straume say that if you spend enough of your spare time surfing, you’ll find worms, Tro-jan horses, rootkits, spyware, adware and viruses clinging like barnacles to your hard drive.

Some are just a pain in the software. Some actually transmit your keystrokes to a remote computer via your Internet connec-tion, allowing someone in Bophuthatswana to gain your bank account numbers and passwords.
Some malware is easy to find with standard virus checkers and protection software and some are not. Some can turn off your virus checker and prevent it from updating or scanning, holding the barn door open for other Internet jackals to come in.

Uh, don’t ask how I know that.
“Some of the malware is really well written,” Mr. Harrison says with awe. “Most malware is caught because the scanning software can trace its operation. Some will actually sense a virus scan and shut themselves down so they’re not noticed. Then they turn back on when the scan is over or when the computer is rebooted.”
According to sandboxie.com, that’s why a guy named Ronen Tzur wrote the software. He figured that, if you don’t give the bad guys access to your hard drive, they can’t hang around.

The idea is simple. Sandboxie runs on a specified portion of a hard drive and keeps everything within those boundaries. Cookies, pop-ups, downloads, anything that normally is swapped between computers communicating on the Internet is kept within the boundary.
When you close the program, the virtual hard drive shuts down and disappears, taking with it everything that transpired on the Web.
“It essentially resets your computer so that it’s just as if you never searched the Web,” Mr. Harrison explains. “If you log on to the Internet at, say, 8:15 and surf until 8:30, when you get off the Internet, everything is set back to the way it was at 8:15. So, instead of your virus checker trying to get rid of malware after it’s already on your hard drive, this keeps the bad stuff from getting to the hard drive in the first place.”

It sounded good in theory, but before they could recommend it, the Quick Fix geeks had to test it.
“I loaded it onto my kids’ computer. Hey, I’d never use my own for this kind of thing. If I break the kids’ computer, I can fix it. I don’t want all of my files exposed if something doesn’t work,” he laughs. “Anyway, I went to all of the bad Web sites where everyone knows you can pick up lots of malware.”
We know exactly what kind of sites he’s talking about, don’t we?
“Exactly, the sites that advertise free downloads of other people’s software, like ‘download Microsoft Office for free,’ and stuff like that,” Mr. Harrison explains. “People who will give away someone else’s product for nothing have no ethical problems about getting paid by someone to download their virus onto your machine along with the free software, and that’s exactly what happens.”

After surfing, the kids’ computer hosted an interesting array of cyber slugs, worms and bugs, Harrison recalls. Exiting the Sandboxed browser, however, wiped them out. It did it every time.
“It kept everything from getting through. It really worked,” he says. “We recommend it to our customers for their machines and we use it on ours at the office. What’s even better is that it works and it’s free.”