I am wondering if Sandboxie would eliminate the risk of being on the internet with XP after April. Would Sandboxie make online banking safer?
Thanks
Not necessarily. Using an inherently insecure operating system does not help either.
Use of sandboxie will help some, but not to the point that an actively running attack is prevented from occurring in your browser at the same time while you are logged on to your banking site. Dumping all contents of the Sandboxie sandbox after use will dump everything into the trash, but a separate program such as Trusteer instead will work better for your online banking purposes.
If malware enters into the Sandboxie sandbox, it remains inside unless you grant permission/allow it to download to the real operating system environment. If it is malware that intercepts a https: communication, as in a live banking logon session, (MITM attack) it will not matter if it is sandboxed or not, as the secure data will still be intercepted and sent off to the hacker’s IP address.
All Sandboxie does is create a virtual browser in the sandbox, and does not run the real one, and thus prevents unwanted changes to the real browser when you end your session with it.
It is impossible to say as we don’t know what hidden vulnerabilities may yet lay in XP. With that said, I still do online banking on a unofficially patched Win 98 system and have never had a problem.
Please bookmark http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/34-windows-xp/ as this forum will become very active soon.
***Edit: I should footnote that much of today’s malware cannot run on the Win 98 kernel; however, this will not apply to Win XP.
Thanks for the help.
You’re welcome. 