Scam resistant sandbox please!

October 12, 2022 8:35 AM

My industry is sadly rife with scammers including those who pose as legit business opportunities. I usually click on links on a sandboxed computer on its own separate Wi-Fi. That computer is temporarily down. Is there a way for me to install a secure sandbox on an extant machine? MacOS and iOS. Happy to subscribe to a commercial service. Thank you!
posted by The Last Sockpuppet to Technology (1 answer total)

On MacOS I would use VMWare or Parallels to create a MacOS virtual machine inside my "real" machine, then back it up to an external drive every night/week/month. The virtual machine would have a bare minimum of software installed on it. You can share a folder between the virtual machine and the host machine if you need to move data between the two, but I would not share, e.g., my whole Documents folder but rather a single special-purpose folder that was generally kept empty. If the virtual machine is compromised, then you just restore it from a backup.

And of course on the VM and the host machine I would use an adblocker and keep my machines up to date.

On iOS you could enable Lockdown mode, though it has drawbacks.
posted by jedicus at 9:11 AM on October 12, 2022 [3 favorites]