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[Sandboxie Status Update] What happened to the Sandboxie site and forums? [Last updated Sept 10th 2019]

LATEST UPDATE - September 10th 2019

Major Sandboxie News: Sandboxie is now a free tool with plans to transition it to an open source tool

https://community.sophos.com/products/sandboxie/f/forum/115109/major-sandboxie-news-sandboxie-is-now-a-free-tool-with-plans-to-transition-it-to-an-open-source-tool/414182#414182



Hi all,

This is Barb@Invincea (Barb@Sophos in this community).

First, we'd like to explain a bit of what happened with Sandboxie.com and the forums (forums.sandboxie.com -currently offline):

We started experiencing issues with our servers due to a bug that is causing slowness accessing the Sandboxie site, as well as the licensing/activation options.
Added to that, we found a security weakness in the software being used for the forums, and out of an abundance of caution, they were taken down for the time being. 

In order to keep communication going, we have created this temporary forum within our Sophos Community.

Second, here's the current status of things:

  • A new Sandboxie build has been created to help us address part of the issues, but due to the current server status, it cannot be automatically pushed to users.  To manually download it please see below:
           Click here to download Sandboxie 5.30
           Latest Beta versions are listed here
     
          
  • As of now, we will only support issues related to Sandboxie 5.30 (XP users see below).
  • XP Users need to perform the following steps to avoid their computers to constantly use your network to access sandboxie.com :

  • Click Help --> Check for Updates
    Choose "Next week"
    Do not choose "Never" (or your computer will not stop contacting the Sandboxie site, using your network resources). 


  • For the time being, buying options are not available (to prevent additional issues with our licensing server).
  • Licenses and activations are working now.  For activation issues please follow this thread: Activation failed - Please provide feedback
    For Offline activations: the page is not properly redirecting, please use these links instead:
    Offline activation
    Offline activation steps
  • Dev teams are actively working on investigating the issues and finding fixes for them. 

We would like to thank everybody for their patience and understanding. 
Please, feel free to start a new thread in this forum as needed (Sandboxie v5.30 only).

Regards,
Barb.-




[locked by: Barb@Sbie at 2:58 PM (GMT -7) on 6 May 2019]
[unlocked by: Barb@Sbie at 9:55 PM (GMT -7) on 22 May 2019]
[locked by: Barb@Sbie at 9:56 PM (GMT -7) on 22 May 2019]
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  • This reply was deleted.

    Barb@Sophos
    Community Support Engineer | Sophos Technical Support
    Knowledge Base  |  @SophosSupport  | Sign up for SMS Alerts
    If a post solves your question use the 'This helped me' link.

     

  • I downloaded SandboxieInstall.exe from https://www.sandboxie.com/DownloadSandboxie a few minutes ago, and the EXE i got was identically with version 5.28 from February (i checked it with a MD5 compare tool). The EXE from the post above was version 5.30 from April, so i think you should have a look at the download area within sandboxie.com, so that it also is the newest version 5.30 and not the 5.28 with the Update-Loop-problem.

     

    Also you probably want to add the tip for the XP-users (or for all users of version 5.28 and older), that they can manually edit the sandboxie.INI in path c:\windows, and change the value of "SbieCtrl_NextUpdateCheck" to 2124300600, so that the update question is delayed to 25th April 2037. Otherwise they have to click "Next week" every week, and "Never" always adds the date of 18th April 2019 into the INI and so the Update-Question-Loop is restarting. The conversion between Unix-TimeStamp und readable date can be made for example at www.onlineconversion.com/unix_time.htm

  • Hi Ralph,

    I just downloaded the files and they are for Sandboxie 5.30 , the sha/md5 match the ones posted on our website:

    https://www.sandboxie.com/AllVersions.php 

    5.30 All SandboxieInstall-530.exe
     MD5  6b13a590f39d7354e04f13706ebb7ef1 
     SHA1 185be6ab6b4b188aab94d37964ed53c0439e5a39 
    			
      32-bit SandboxieInstall32-530.exe
     MD5  13578bcbf82c867d31b08bc185df8bc6  
     SHA1 40241dee13c07b86011fb4b112f34ea793ad69eb 
    			
      64-bit SandboxieInstall64-530.exe
     MD5  4055456544821aeaffa4f2c315f51ee9
     SHA1 56c8a17a9079b6768efa9f3fa484a1f726d5a4a9  
    			

    Can you provide some screenshots of what are you seeing, and the exact link you used? 

    Regarding the steps for XP users, they are on the front page of Sandboxie com, as well as on the first post in this thread.
    I'll add them to the Downloads section as well. Thanks for the idea! 

    Barb@Sophos
    Community Support Engineer | Sophos Technical Support
    Knowledge Base  |  @SophosSupport  | Sign up for SMS Alerts
    If a post solves your question use the 'This helped me' link.

     

  • Hello Barb@Sophos,

    here i describe you, how i downloaded it:

    First, i try to go to https://www.sandboxie.com/DownloadSandboxie , which is not easy since a few days, because i very often have time outs after a while of loading (Statusbar of Firefox shows "TLS handshake with www.sandboxie.com" while loading). When the site has loaded, it shows me the following:

     

    The download links (in red boxes) show me https://www.sandboxie.com/SandboxieInstall.exe, and when i click them...

     

    i got the file, which has MD5-checksum "39cd9e88279d2ffe25cb340be1b6244a", which is from version 5.28 (stored on my harddisk since February).

    But i think, you have corrected the wrong file now, because after typing this posting, i made a new download while capturing the last screenshot for this posting, and now the MD5 is "6b13a590f39d7354e04f13706ebb7ef1", which belongs to version 5.30 (All). So this should be okay now i think.

  • Hi Ralph W,

     

    Glad to hear things are fine now. We did not make any changes, so not sure what could have happened. 

    Do let us know if you can replicate the issue.  

    BTW, I added an additional note for XP users in the downloads section. Thanks again for bringing that up! 

     

    Barb@Sophos
    Community Support Engineer | Sophos Technical Support
    Knowledge Base  |  @SophosSupport  | Sign up for SMS Alerts
    If a post solves your question use the 'This helped me' link.

     

  • Greetings all, new member here.

     

    Sandboxie.com is still proving unreachable as I type this. Is the site coming back online or not? I'm somewhat hesitant to install 5.30 until it does.

  • I have the same problem, Can't register the purchased version.

    Have tried it for several hours, unfortunately without success. 

  • There's something going on then. It shouldn't take DAYS for a major software provider to get back online. The descriptions of cobbled attempts to resurrect a working server somewhere "in an hour or two" don't do much to inspire confidence either.

    Looks like it may be time to find an alternative.

  • I agree. I can't believe that a company as big as Sophos can't get the website and forum rehosted by now, and with secure community software. I'm not installing 5.30 until the licensing server is back up and running.

    I also hope this is not the end of Sandboxie, as I can't find anything functionally equivalent. 

  • Barb@Sophos said:

    Glad to hear things are fine now. We did not make any changes, so not sure what could have happened

     

    You must be joking, right? There was a checksum mismatch and you don't know why? So who can access "your" servers  beside you? Are you auditing SB source code? If you can't guard you ftp, your code probably already carries a malicious payload...

  • Hi Jarosław Glaca ,

    Most likely, they checked the hash using the wrong executable files. Nothing changed on our end and our files are fine. 
    The SHAs and MD5s were corroborated an posted along with the new builds. 

    Regards,

    Barb@Sophos
    Community Support Engineer | Sophos Technical Support
    Knowledge Base  |  @SophosSupport  | Sign up for SMS Alerts
    If a post solves your question use the 'This helped me' link.

     

  • Hi,

    I've just got the update loop bug and found my way here.
    The SandboxieInstall.exe file found on https://www.sandboxie.com/DownloadSandboxie is for version 5.28 (I've checked the hash and even reinstalled it to confirm it is version 5.28).
    There is no installer for version 5.30 on the Sandboxie website. There is no mention of version 5.30 on the list changes page and on the md5/sha1 page.

    My first thought was that the website has been hacked because the announcement on the main page https://www.sandboxie.com/ contains spelling mistakes (suppport, which the last version that supports XP).

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