SoftwarePolicy

Even a good antivirus can fail to detect a freshly-minted malware. However, there are other ways to protect a computer, besides using a traditional security program. A simple, but effective solution is SoftwarePolicy. This simple utility gives you the power to decide where applications can start from, so you can be sure that nothing but the applications you have in Program Files or other folders are allowed to launch. This way, if you catch a piece of malware, it won't be able to do anything, if it's not in one of your whitelisted folders.

SoftwarePolicy is offered completely free of charge and it can be used on various Windows platforms, from Win XP to Win 10. It comes in a small package and it can be installed in under a minute, without any kind of difficulties. The application doesn't have any special requirements and you don't need powerful hardware to run it.

Launching the software on your computer and letting it run in the background is all you have to do. SoftwarePolicy is set by default to prevent any program from running, unless it's from the Program Files folder or other critical locations, like AppData. Application launches from any other folders will be blocked automatically. Though the software was designed to block ransomware, through this method, it works with many other threat types as well, since it doesn't rely on identifying malicious code.

The software comes with a compact user interface, which presents only three simple options, for locking and unlocking the current policy and for configuring the policy. You should note, however, that the policy can only be modified by editing instructions in a text file. The good news is that each instruction is explained in great detail and most of them only involve switching a value between "true" and "false".

SoftwarePolicy works constantly in the background, but you can bring up its user interface through a system tray icon, if you want to pause or modify the current policy. The application lets you perform other operations as well, through the same icon, including shutting down or restarting the computer.

With SoftwarePolicy working on your computer, you can be sure that no applications will launch unless they really have to.