Security Implications
The use of hypervisor technology by malware and rootkits installing themselves as a hypervisor below the operating system can make them more difficult to detect because the malware could intercept any operations of the operating system (such as someone entering a password) without the antivirus software necessarily detecting it (since the malware runs below the entire operating system). Implementation of the concept has allegedly occurred in the SubVirt laboratory rootkit (developed jointly by Microsoft and University of Michigan researchers) as well as in the Blue Pill malware package. However, such assertions have been disputed by others who claim that it would indeed be possible to detect the presence of a hypervisor-based rootkit.
In 2009, researchers from Microsoft and North Carolina State University demonstrated a hypervisor-layer anti-rootkit called Hooksafe that can provide generic protection against kernel-mode rootkits.
Read more about this topic: Hypervisor
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