Hacking Exposed Malware & Rootkits: Security Secrets and Solutions, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 5

VIRTUAL ROOTKITS

Virtual computing, or virtualization, is a computing environment that simulates or acts like a real computing system, hence, the name virtual machine or virtual system. Most enterprises are moving into virtualization today because it makes their systems more agile and simpler to manage. Small and medium-size businesses are also finding virtualization cheaper than traditional hardware-based computer systems. It boils down to lowering operating costs. Even home users such as myself use virtualization for our computing needs.

The pace at which virtualization is being adopted has also made it very popular with attackers. Instead of malware avoiding a virtual system altogether out of fear that it is really a test machine ...