Virtual Machine = Virtual Vulnerability?

Paul and Cutaway both write about the latest research in VM escaping and it's not pretty. The research that is not their writing.

It seems that Ed Skoudis and team have come up with a way to really escape a VM and run an exploit on the host system. This is still "shaky" in terms of it's not perfect and it's not complete but the potential consequences of this is pretty severe. VM's are used quiet heavily today for many different things. One of the biggest being malware testing. The bad guys have already figured out a way to make that more difficult but this makes it even worse. A VM is used because it can be blown away and reloaded in a matter of minutes so if it get hosed it's no big deal. If the bad guys can cause the VM to crash and then exploit the host machine then that puts AV research in a bit of a bind. VM's are also used by companies to save space, hardware and time. Lots of security software runs on VM's and this has the potential to put all of that at risk.

Read the articles by Cutaway and Paul and do some research yourself and let me know your thoughts. After you have become informed check back on my site and take the new poll. "Are Virtual Machines days numbered?"