Ten years ago, I was getting infected with all sorts of malware on my (then brand new) Windows XP machine. It can be said that I did not any better back then, as much as I know now. In all these years I have learned enough about malware and viruses, that now I stay cautious and do not get open the websites of the type that are generally known to be attack sites. If I have to venture into some unknown part of the world wide web, then I use Sandboxie to prevent any real damage happening to my PC in case I encounter a drive-by-download infection site.
But the German government has now provided an even much more secure web browser for you to use – called BitBox (short for Browser In The Box). The BitBox is not a usual application, but it is actually a VirtualBox package containing operating system and the Firefox web browser. BitBox first runs the VirtualBox which loads a virtual operating system (Linux) and then loads the Firefox web browser from the Linux. So all the changes or malware infections (if any) that happen, actually take place inside the virtual Linux operating system – leaving your actual Windows operating system completely untouched.
You can download the BitBox installation package from the Sirrus website. The download is around 500 MB in size. You have to create a new user named BitBox in Windows under which the BitBox browser is going to run. This makes your current user profile unaffected by any BitBox related activities.
When BitBox runs, it reloads the authorized application file from the original BitBox package – this makes it impossible for any malware to modify BitBox files itself. So if you encounter any malware during your previous session with BitBox, it gets cleaned automatically the next time you run BitBox.
Conclusion: The BitBox web browser is a super-secure web browser which loads in its own virtual operating system. But it should only be used if you are really going to browse the known malicious and attack sites. For ordinary web browsing, the usual security methods (like a good antivirus, updated web browsers, sand-boxed web browsers, etc.) are good enough.
You can download BitBox from http://download.sirrix.com/content/pages/bbdl.htm.