This reminds me of why I am wary of dual boot set-ups. Someone could write a Windows virus to attack your Linux system files, or a Linux virus to attack your Windows system files. In either case any normal antivirus software would not be running.
Not sure if that exists in real life, either.-daddydave
It
has been done, but pretty much just a proof of concept thing. Doesn't really make sense for a normal piece of malware, since the gains are extremely small and the code complexity quite a bit higher.
The usable lifespan of a broken disk is short enough, adding in the complexity and disk access to get the drive mounted might make it tougher to get anything off.-x16wda
Do what you always ought to do with a failing disk: make an image and salvage from that. It's less stressful to do a linear read from the beginning to the end rather than copying individual files that are likely to be scattered all over the disk...
Anyway, this vm-infecting thing is hardly a big deal. It's not a break-out of the vm. I find it kinda silly that this feature is included in a generic piece of malware, given that the gains for zombie-gathering purposes is pretty small.
For hitting specific targets it could be useful (infecting VMs that get mass distributd to the cloud, or images that are used for corporate roll-out), but in a generic piece of malware? Ho humm.
PS: vm-breakouts
have been done, but tend not to make it into normal malware - again, the gains aren't big enough, and it makes the vendors aware of the exploit... makes much more sense to keep such an exploit private, and use it for high-profile targets
