sanboxie with perl and gmail attachments

[yelintun]

Greetings,

I'm trying to protect my home PC from attachments, but am very new to using a sandbox. It's an automated application so it's not run from my browser. Not sure what the best way to use this product is.

User uploads file (text or Excel) to website.
Uploaded file sent to VirusTotal for scanning.
Uploaded file emailed to Gmail account as attachment.

home PC
Perl program1 opens Gmail, finds the attachment, writes it to disk.
Perl program2 does data processing which includes MySQL DB
Perl program3 emails output file to final destination

Please pardon my ignorance if I should "just put everything in the sandbox," but seems like I should be isolating all this as much as possible. I may be over-thinking all this though. The perl progs have been packed so no need to call the interpreter.

Any advice on how best to do this?

Thanks in advance

-Ye Lin Tun

[Barb@Invincea]

Hello yelintun,

If the application is invoked via a Sandboxed application, it will then be Sandboxed. Keep in mind that the purpose of Sandboxie is to isolate applications to avoid making any changes to your host (unless explicitly allowed).

If the application is invoked in a different manner, you may need to either run it Sandboxed or use the paid features (Force Process) in order to force it to launch Sandboxed every time it opens.
Here's more information:
https://www.sandboxie.com/ProgramStartSettings#program

Regarding protecting your email, please see:
https://www.sandboxie.com/FAQ_Email
https://www.sandboxie.com/EmailProtection
https://www.sandboxie.com/TestEmailConfiguration

Regards,
Barb.-

[yelintun]

Thanks Barb,

My concern is that the attachment could have/be a virus, which could then make changes to my home PC when I do the data processing.

The price of your product is very reasonable. I would be happy to buy it. Would it make the most sense, as far as safety and using your product, to just download the attachment to a "forced folder" to isolate it from the rest of my system? What I'm trying to do is download a potentially dangerous file to my home PC, open it, read the contents and do some processing (safely).

Any further advice would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

Regards,

-Ye Lin Tun

[Barb@Invincea]

Hello yelintun,

If you launch the application Sandboxed, its contents (including downloaded files) will be stored in the Sandbox. You can then, use recovery options to move the files to your host: https://www.sandboxie.com/RecoverySettings

I don't know exactly how your program works but you can try everything I posted, except for the Force Folder/process features with the free version:
https://www.sandboxie.com/DownloadSandboxie

Regarding Forced Folder, that could work as well. However, read the full entry for exceptions:
https://www.sandboxie.com/ForceFolder

If you are planning on dealing with malware, be sure to review these:
https://www.sandboxie.com/FrequentlyAsk ... rSolutions
viewtopic.php?p=131363#p131363
viewtopic.php?p=128539#p128539

Regards,
Barb.-

[BoredNow]

You could always open your Start menu - click on Sandboxie - and from the drop down menu you then click on "Run Windows Explorer Sandboxed" and continue on as usual. That way anything you do is within Sandboxie.
You can specify that only Perl can run and/or access the Internet. That way if something unwanted tries to open or call out, it will be blocked.

Fyi -- In Windows 7 you can Pin "Run Windows Explorer Sandboxed" to your desktop and it shows up as a sandboxed "My Computer" icon.

[yelintun]

Thanks for the additional information Barb and BoredNow,

I'm just paranoid about willingly downloading files, uploaded to my website, which could be dangerous without doing everything I can to protect myself. I would be kicking myself if I didn't use a sandbox as well and some virus got through my frontline defenses (i.e. VirusTotal's 40+ AV vendor scans) as unlikely as that could be.

Looks like I've got to read up on all this to see how best to implement it.

Thanks again!

Regards,

-Ye Lin Tun