, 2006-04-12
Sometimes we don't really see what our eyes are viewing. That's true with your computer screen, and it's true in nature as well. Oh sure, we can say what we think we're seeing, but we're missing the big story such as the man behind the curtain, to recall a famous phrase from an even more beloved movie.
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This doesn't remove the requirement for windows to have a complete set virus scanners, patches, and rebuilds/installs.
It just makes the rebuilds/installs a little easier.
The actual data being manipulated by windows is just as vulnerable as it always is.
Do not think that virtualization will fix this problem. All it does is make:
1. rebooting more reliable (you can always reboot the virtual system from a 'clean' system)
2. cleaning up from catastrophic virus infection (delete the contaminated VM, copy from backup, reboot)
3. running multiple virtual machines isolates problems to only the infected VM.
Of course, it also tends to isolate data files too. And if you are sharing data files among multiple VMs, you still have a virus problem, because all of the VMs would get infected at the same time... and possibly faster too.
Virtualization is really to improve testing and reliability.
Not security.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/397/33488#33488