Some of you probably read about the vulnerability in Vista that doesn’t just take advantage of any new exploit but rather Vista’s fundamental architecture all together.

Well the way this systematic attack is approached is via an arbitrary browser exploit.  But what if browser exploits were cut off from the main machine?

Meet ZoneAlarm’s new security tool that’s been a bit long in coming in my opinion.  It’s called ForceField (and with good reason).

What the product does is put your browser inside of a virtual environment that’s totally cut off from the underlying OS.  It also cuts off the OS from the browser (helping negate the effects of keystroke loggers and such).

Now earlier they were giving away free CD keys for ForceField and I registered for a copy (1 year subscription).  It doesn’t have Vista 64-bit support unfortunately but it is on my laptop (32-bit Windows XP) and I’d say that it runs rather well.  My laptop is a machine that’s gaining a little age (although it’s far from old) and typically has some trouble running Firefox 3.0 with all my normal extensions.  However even running virtually, it still runs rather fast (negligible performance decreases).

So aside from negating this proposed attack, it can also protect against a wide variety of other problems, and it’s existence (albeit probably inevitable) is certainly welcome.  It will certainly be nice to be even less concerned about visited websites leaving cookies, ads containing exploits, and the like.