What is "Sandboxing"?

If there's one thing about tech terminology, it's that sometimes tech terms are not easy to understand. Case in point, a term used to describe a software management strategy that isolates applications from critical system resources and other programs. It provides an extra layer of security that prevents malware or harmful applications from negatively affecting your system - otherwise known as sandboxing. 

Without sandboxing, an application may have unrestricted access to most of not all system resources and user data on a computer. A sandboxed app on the other hand, can only access resources in its own "sandbox." An application's sandbox is a limited area of storage space and memory that contains the only resources the program requires. If a program needs to access resources or files outside the sandbox, permission must be explicitly granted by the system.

Come to think of it,  a software sandbox is not that different from a sandbox built for a children. By providing a sandbox to play in, we simulate the environment of real beach(in other words, an isolated environment) but with restrictions on what a child can do. (I.e., the sandbox keeps them confined in one safe space.) A firewall (such as the Zyxel ZyWALL ATP500) employs sandboxing by creating an isolated cloud environment that contains any unknown files in order to identify any new malware types that conventional static security mechanism cannot detect, ensuring protection against zero-day attacks. 

To learn more about Zyxel's products for advanced protection of evolving threats, click HERE.