(Cybergenic) Shade

Site: www.shadesandbox.com

Author: Eugene Balabanov

Country: Russia

Purpose: Sandbox
Price: Freeware

Today I'll talk about sandbox SW. I'll use the Sandbox definition:

"Sandbox is an alternative for antivirus and a tool for virtualization. It locally virtualizes applications (i.e. internet browsers) and locks all incoming internet files and possible viruses in its safe virtual environment - a “sandbox”, keeping them isolated from the Operating System to maintain it clean from malware."

How it works ? It creates a virtual set of drives inside a root folder, every registry change, file installation, change, it goes there. Every process runs in a protected environment.

What is it good for (me) ? Run virus/trojan infected applications. It won't infect your system, as long as you run them sandboxed.

I've used two over the years. Before Windows 10, I was using Sandboxie. It worked fine. Unfortunately, in my Windows 10 installation, it doesn't work so well, most times you get RPC service errors and processes don't start. So I went hunting for a new one.

And I found Shade. It works the same way, you get a vault you add executables to. Every executable in that vault, when executed, will have a purple border window and be shaded (for Sandboxie, the border window was yellow).

It has worked ... nearly flawlessly. Recently, I downloaded something I knew was "trojaned", confirmed by Bitdefender (my AV, topic for another day). I ran it shaded but a few secs later, it triggered a BSOD. No harm done to the system, though.

Still, sandbox tool is a mandatory piece of SW these days, because sometimes you get an application you want to run, and it is virused in a way that it can't be cleaned.