Vulnerabilities of Virtual Machines. How Hackers Escape the Virtual Environment.
Many of you have already installed and configured a virtual system for safe work, opening suspicious files, documents, and websites. Virtual isolation is indeed a great protection tool, but far from flawless. In this chapter, we will discuss how hackers and intelligence agencies overcome the barrier of the virtual environment and how to protect yourself from this threat.
Let’s assume there is a document, link, or application created by an attacker to gain access to your device and your data. You, as a sensible person, run it in a virtual environment hoping that it will protect you from potential threats. But this time, you are not facing a script kiddie with a popular trojan, but a professional hacker determined to gain access to your system at any cost.
For a successful attack, they need to escape the virtual environment. Let’s consider how this is possible.
Escaping the Virtual Environment Using Standard VirtualBox Tools
You are probably already familiar with tools for interacting between the guest and host systems, such as shared clipboard, shared folder, and Drag'n'Drop. This is indeed convenient: you copy in the main system and paste in the virtual one or simply drag the required file from one system to another.
Creating a bridge between the guest and host systems is not the wisest step from a security standpoint. I hope you understand that a hacker can also take advantage of these tools to access your main system. We recommend avoiding them in favor of safer data transfer methods.
No, don’t think that it’s very easy to make a “breakout” from the virtual system, for example, with the shared clipboard enabled; however, it is significantly easier than without it.