A lot of software, especially pirated software, comes with malicious code. This malicious code can infect your computer and give you a lot of trouble. Starting from worm viruses to Trojan viruses that steal valuable information such as financial data, account passwords, identity information and many more. This can be a nightmare.
One prevention step is using an antivirus. There are lots of good and bad antivirus programs out there. And sometimes attackers use an antivirus to infect your computer by providing a crack tool or keygen generator. If you are not careful then you can be easily infected.
To run unknown/malicious software without getting infected, you can use Sandboxie. Sandboxie runs your programs in an isolated space which prevents them from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer.
How does it work? See the animation below:
The animation illustrates that Sandboxie is able to intercept the changes and isolate them within a sandbox, depicted as a yellow rectangle. It also illustrates that grouping the changes together makes it easy to delete all of them at once.
Sandboxie does not just secure you from running malicious code. It also protects you from malicious code when browsing the internet. You just run your favorite web browser under Sandboxie. And terminate that application from Sandboxie when finished. This means browsing history, cookies, and cached temporary files collected while web browsing stay in the sandbox and don’t leak into Windows.