Hardening Security: Protection For Virtual Machines

Well-known recent incidents in hosting industry, related to virtual environment ‘hacks’ resulting in taking over hundreds of VMs have resulting in security measures hardening and developing new means to protect virtual machines. FindMySoft in its post Trend Micro Core Protection Software Secures Virtual Machines announces further security hardening for VMWare-based VMs.
 
The story goes: Trend Micro, company that specializes in providing network antivirus and internet content security software, has decided to tackle the issue of virtual machines security and in this regard it has announced Core Protection, a security software solution that secures VMware ESX/ESXi environments. For the enterprise that uses Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines this translates into maximized economic benefits without giving up on datacenter security.
 
With Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines you can secure active and dormant VMware virtual machines in a comprehensive and efficient manner. Layered protection is ensured by using the VMsafe APIs from VMware and by using dedicated scanning VMs coordinated with real-time agents within the VM.
 
General Manager for the Enterprise Business Unit with Trend Micro, Tom Miller, comments: “As virtualization revolutionizes computing, it is introducing new risks to the security of the datacenter. Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines goes further than any other product in the industry towards providing specialized content security for virtual servers, both active and dormant, in today’s dynamic datacenter.”
 
Trend Micro Core Protection for Virtual Machines highlights:
- Security solution optimized for virtualized environments.
- Protects virtual machines (even dormant ones) against malware.
- Provides simplified security management by integrating with the VMware management infrastructure.
- It will be easy to deploy.
 
It is well known that virtual machines, looking well-protected against the malware, hacks and other plagues of ‘real’ computers, are as vulnerable as both host and hosted OS are. Thus, in many a case VM could be wide open to all kind of attacks, resulting from careless setup and lack of system-level protection.
 
Virtualized hosting solutions are becoming more popular, as ‘budget’ replacement for the expensive dedicated servers. Taking into account that VM users tend to treat ‘isolated’ in terms of VMS as ‘well-protected’, additional layers of protection, for both new and existing VMs could prevent the mentioned disaster from happening again. The advice for users of out-of-date VMWare-based virtual machines would be to both upgrade and to monitor the activity related to possible external threats, to handle it properly when necessary.
 

This article was brought to you by the developers of IPHost Network Monitor, network and server monitoring software.

Advertisement