this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'

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A Windows XP machine's life expectancy in 2024 seems to be about 10 minutes before even just an idle net connection renders it a trojan-riddled zombie PC (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Just a fun, somewhat terrifying read

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I guess you missed the bit about it running on a virtual machine, huh?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I guess you have no idea about Virtual Machine escape, huh?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Actuall, no. If a VM can be broken, how come everyone goes on about things being perfectly safe to run in one?

It gives people like me a false sense of security.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Exactly. And you can see by the number of upvotes your comment got vs the number of downvotes earned by mine that a false sense of security is shared by the majority.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Well I for one, stand corrected.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

VM does not mean it is safe. There is malware out there that can break the sandbox and infect the hypervisor

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Such an exploit would not get wasted on some random xp honeypot

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's XP, there are likely several unpatched escaping bugs with free POC out there. You don't need anything new.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Surely breaking out of a VM requires exploiting a vulnerability of the VM, not of the OS running in it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I would assume it requires both a hypervisor and guest OS bug to be tripped.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's pure speculation, but I assume you'll need

  1. Enough access to the guest OS so that you can interact directly with the virtual hardware. That would probably require root access, so you'll probably need to exploit some bug in the guest OS to get there.
  2. To break out of the vm, you'll then need to exploit a bug in the virtual hardware. You would want to get the hypervisor to execute arbitrary code.
  3. If you want to infect the host OS, then you'll need sufficient access on the host. If the hypervisor doesn't run with sufficient privileges, you'll have to exploit a bug in the host as well to perform a privilege escalation. But I'm guessing the hypervisor will usually have sufficient privileges, so exploiting the host is probably not necessary.

Sounds like quite a bit of work, but I don't see why malware couldn't automate it. An up-to-date hypervisor should help reduce the risk though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Theres no way an hypervisor zero day gets implemented in some random Malware. Those are worth millions and are used in coordinated manual attacks against VIP targets

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Yeah a zero-day would be very unlikely, but a months-old, publically known and patched vulnerability could always be attempted. One of the reasons why the hypervisor should definitely be kept up-to-date. There is always someone who forgets to patch their software, why not give it a try? We're talking about a Windows XP scenario after all!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

It's XP. There's guaranteed to be a way to go from userland to ring 0 code execution.