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Security Risks of Virtualization
To fully realize the benefits of virtualization, it’s important to get a handle on the risks and unique security issues of this breakthrough technology.
Virtualized environments face the same risks as physical systems—and more:
- Traditional computing platform threat vectors are still a concern—viruses, worms, spyware, Trojans, and other attacks targeting software vulnerabilities and creating buffer overflows, for example
- The risk of propagating infected virtualized images is very high if you don’t have measures in places to ensure the integrity of virtual machines
- With virtual environments, there is a single point of attack, the hypervisor, the virtualization platform that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer at the same time. The hypervisor can be vulnerable to "hyperjacking" rootkit attacks designed to take control of all the virtual machines under management.
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