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Is my host machine completely isolated from a virus-infected virtual machine?

up vote 14 down vote favorite

If I am running a Windows 7 virtual machine on a Windows 7 host using VMWare or VirtualBox (or anything else) and the virtual machine is completelly overloaded with viruses and another malicious code, should I worry about my host machine?

If I have an anti-virus program on host machine will it detect any problems?

2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accept

If the VM is infected with a virus that is targeted at exploiting the VM Software like VMWare Tools it could possible get out but I don't think anything out there is capable of this at the moment. It could also exploit the host over the network if the host is vulnerable.

The anti-virus on the host system should not see viruses in the VM unless they are sitting on a shared folder.

up vote 3 down vote

Should be fine, just turn off access to file sharing and kill the nic inside the VM after the initial infection period.


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Is my host machine completely isolated from a virus-infected virtual machine?

up vote 14 down vote

If I am running a Windows 7 virtual machine on a Windows 7 host using VMWare or VirtualBox (or anything else) and the virtual machine is completelly overloaded with viruses and another malicious code, should I worry about my host machine?

If I have an anti-virus program on host machine will it detect any problems?


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up vote 9 down vote

If the VM is infected with a virus that is targeted at exploiting the VM Software like VMWare Tools it could possible get out but I don't think anything out there is capable of this at the moment. It could also exploit the host over the network if the host is vulnerable.

The anti-virus on the host system should not see viruses in the VM unless they are sitting on a shared folder.

edit

There are a handful of exploits floating around that do this. One could dig through the VMware Security Advisories alone and find a few: vmware.com/security/advisories Other vendors also have issues. - Brad May 27 '11 at 19:47

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