Malware infections are a common phenomenon. Almost every computer has been infected by a malware some time in it’s entire life cycle. Most of them arise from pirated programs which is a fact we are all aware of. Apart from pirated programs, sometimes even the legitimate programs are reported to be infected by the Anti-viruses. This does not necessarily mean the reported program is really infected. It might be a false positive (False positive is a term to point out a faulty action by anti malware applications that report innocent programs as infected). You must have adequate knowledge and expertise to conclude the reported program as infected or not yourself, which might again not be a correct conclusion. All this is crazy and can be tolerated to an extent.

But, if you are keen to use the program, whether it is really infected or not, you can safely run it in an isolated environment created with the help of a freeware application called Sandboxie.

After running the concerned program with sandboxie, all the files that will be created by the program will only be stored in an isolated space created by sandboxie. All the actions taken by the infected program will be locked in that isolated space and hence keeping it’s actions away from your main system. This results in better security. Also, it’s a fact that there exist some malware that Sandboxie can’t take control of, so if you are unable to fool the infected file with Sandboxie, make sure you forget about running it and not let the anti-virus take control instead!

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Raj is a Tech enthusiast and writes at http://www.upcomingtechs.com