They Took The Application As Well…

Virtualization is still big news, some would even say that its getting bigger every week. If you are using virtual machines then consider the impact of someone stealing a virtual image. Virtualization offers a lot of opportunities and a great deal of flexibility - however it also offers new threats. There has been a lot of talk of compromising the hypervisor and therefore the virtual machines that sit above it, but there is another interesting threat when it comes to data loss.

One of the benefits of a virtual machine is to be able to lump together everything you need for a machine into a single file, ok, so the file might be 50GB - but its still a file. One of the other benefits is that you can load, unload, move, copy and generally manage the file - as a file. What if that file goes missing - or it is stolen? The answer is that unless it is protected (encrypted or restricted to which physical machines it can be run on) it could be run by anyone on anything - in that case they won’t just get the data in the virtual machine, but also the application needed to access the data as well.

When looking at potential areas where data loss can occur you need to look outside the box - in this case Virtual Machines and how they could be exploited should they fall into the wrong hands.

March 19, 2008 | Filed Under data-loss, security | Leave a Comment