Shoutbox

Say I have a virtual OS running in my host WinXP Pro PC, and that I run an infected file in the virtual OS, will my host PC be also infected or just the virtual OS?

What would the point of a virtual pc be if changes made to it affected the host pc?

No. Thats the beauty of virtual machines. Wreck it, and you can just start a new one, all without affecting the host PC

No. Well.. it's very unlikely. There have been some cases in the past where you can use things like buffer overflows in the VM to affect the services you install (VMWare calls them VMWare Tools, I cant mind what MS calls them) which communicate between the VM and the host.

But as I say, unlikely.

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
No. Well.. it's very unlikely. There have been some cases in the past where you can use things like buffer overflows in the VM to affect the services you install (VMWare calls them VMWare Tools, I cant mind what MS calls them) which communicate between the VM and the host.

But as I say, unlikely.

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Virus writers have better things to do than ensure that their viruses exploit common VM vulnerabilities just so they can have a few extra infected PCs.

Actually, a virus could look through your shared files and replace any exe it found with an infected one, so next time you run that exe your real computer also gets infected.

But I don't know any virus that does this

quote:

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Originally posted by andrewdodd13
No. Well.. it's very unlikely. There have been some cases in the past where you can use things like buffer overflows in the VM to affect the services you install (VMWare calls them VMWare Tools, I cant mind what MS calls them) which communicate between the VM and the host.

But as I say, unlikely.

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I'm currently using VMWare. So, is it safer NOT to install the VMWare Tools? (I already did , is there a way to unninstall them?)

Leave VMWare tools installed. The tools highly improve the performance, and a virus affecting it is highly unlikely. There's a big difference between buffer overflows being reported and actual viruses in the wild abusing this. As far as i know there are no viruses targetting VMWare, and i assume the buffer overflows Andrew talks about are already fixed by now.

No need to worry .

MenthiX is correct, as far as I can tell.

I would imagine though that it's not 100% perfect in extreme-data-sensitive situations - I know that at work we use VMWare to train people to use Business Objects sometimes, and our information is very secretive so the VM is isolated as much as possible.

But if you were to deliberately run something like Win32.* virus inside a VM, it will be fine.

Well, from all the replies I must conclude then that VMWare is as safe as an AV Quarantine when it comes to isolating viruses from the host.