Business IT - Technology for your business

No. 1 Story

Telstra adds one million mobile services, but Sensis plummets

Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.

read more

VMware Critical Vulnerability

Business IT - Technology

Security sites are abuzz with news of a critical VMware vulnerability.

On April 3rd, VMware released two sets of updates.  The first addressed problems with "openssl, bind and vim."  The second was for "multiple security issues."

It turns out that the "multiple security issues" are rather serious.  In fact they gave rise to an additional advisory rated 'critical' by the folks at VMware.

The vulnerability allows a task running in the hosted virtual environment to execute code on the host Operating System.

This is serious.  Very serious.

As part of the push to green the data centre many organisations are turning to virtual machine environments to enable highly separated, independent tasks to run concurrently on a single physical device.  Hosted websites for SMEs are an obvious example.

Now we find that any one of those virtual machines can influence the base OS, and by implication have dire effects upon other virtual environments on the same system.  There is a rolling demo of the exploit here.

Immediately following the first two updates, SANS reported the release of an exploit (only available for payment to the developers) and subsequently a whitepaper (also attracting a fee) that details the attack.  Oddly SANS chose not to publish links!

It seems that VMware have fixed the problem – the third advisory specifies the minimum version levels of all VMware products required to defeat the issue.  However, this is the first time that an inter-machine vulnerability has been identified, something we were always assured couldn't happen.

Loading comments ...

- sponsored feature -

The Death of Traditional BI: What’s Next?

How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business IP PABX BUYING GUIDE

Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more