New Symantec Research: Threats to Virtual Environments
Virtualisation offers enterprises a number of attractive benefits, including increased scaling, efficiency, and
flexibility. According to Forrester Research, 70 percent of organisations are using server virtualisation or will move
to it by the end of 2015.
But is it secure?
Today, Symantec released new research examining the most popular threats against virtual environments and how malware
behaves on virtualised systems. A few key findings:
• Attackers have found ways to infect virtual guest machines, and in some rare cases even break out of them;
• Malware used in targeted attacks has been increasingly designed to evade automated detection on virtual machines: On
average, 82 percent of threats continue to run on virtual machines, and increasingly use some sophisticated methods to
bypass automated detection;
• Virtual networks and dynamically deployed images require adapted security tools.