Stories about: VMware

The vast majority of companies have little or no security in place for their virtual systems. That is a scary statistic revealed in a survey of attendees at the recent VMWorld 2008 conference in Las Vegas.

While VMware this week is holding its own VMworld party in Las Vegas, attendees at Interop New York were told about the potential security risks of virtual environments, not the least of which are people.

A major VMware security initiative announced more than six months ago has still not resulted in any new products, but VMware and partners this week are demonstrating several prototypes of technology that will better secure virtual machines.

If you want to know about the latest malicious rootkit, ask security researcher Dino Dai Zovi. He'll tell you all about his proof of concept rootkit called Vitriol that uses virtual machine instructions in Intel processors to hide a rootkit at the virtualization layer.

Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center caused scores of companies to reconsider their disaster recovery and business continuity plans, whether they were affected by those catastrophic events or not.

Version 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools.

Two years ago, GreenBorder, one of the early "sandbox" browsers, received mighty applause from Wall Street Journal tech guru Walt Mossberg. The sandbox browser -- basically, a browser running in a virtual container -- promised to keep nasty code from spilling into a computer's operating system and wreaking havoc.

Security issues often seem to smolder more than burn, but these six are certainly capable of lighting a fire under IT professionals at a moment's notice. Handle with care.

As enterprises seek out ways to reduce IT costs, optimize resources and improve operational efficiencies, three technology trends have started to dominate: virtualization, service-oriented architecture and mobility. More promising yet is the intertwining of these unique technologies.

There are two ways to predict the future with 100% accuracy. You either have the power to shape the future to your predictions (the God method) or you make your predictions vague enough so that they fit most conceivable outcomes (the Nostradamus method). For those of us without omnipotence and with a desire to write something meaningful, that leaves the alternative: extrapolate from in-depth research, solid statistics and current trends and hope for minimum volatility (disruptive innovation or externalities) in the outcome.

Virtual servers are prone to the same attacks that plague physical servers, as well as to new threats that exploit weaknesses in hypervisor technology, experts warn.