Thread Info
  • State Suggested Answer
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 27 replies
  • Answers 1 answer
  • Subscribers 19 subscribers
  • Views 118414 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Suggested
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

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

Barb@Sophos

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]
Parents
  • 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.

     

  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    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

  • 0 in reply to Ralph W

    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.

     

  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    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.

  • 0 in reply to Mark Lackey

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

    Have tried it for several hours, unfortunately without success. 

  • 0 in reply to Raimund Günther

    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.

  • 0 in reply to Mark Lackey

    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. 

  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    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...

  • 0 in reply to Jarosław Glaca

    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.

     

  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    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).

  • 0 in reply to Johnny B1

    Hey Johnny B1 ,

    Our dev team is currently making changes to the site. Please use the alternative links:
         [Click here for alternative links]

    We'll correct the spelling mistake. The site is not hacked, it was down due to issues as explained in the first post. Thanks for bringing this up!

    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.

     

  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    Thanks for the quick answer. Just one more question. Before I found out about version 5.30 I've blocked SbieCtrl.exe from connecting to the internet using my firewall to stop the update loop. It's OK if I keep using version 5.28 until you fix the website to avoid possible problems with the licensing server if I install v5.30?

Reply
  • 0 in reply to Barb@Sophos

    Thanks for the quick answer. Just one more question. Before I found out about version 5.30 I've blocked SbieCtrl.exe from connecting to the internet using my firewall to stop the update loop. It's OK if I keep using version 5.28 until you fix the website to avoid possible problems with the licensing server if I install v5.30?

Children
Unfiltered HTML