AMD defends Pacifica against stealth malware threat

A DING DONG on Eweek's "Security Watch" page has AMD set off against Joanna Rutkowska who claims that AMD Pacifica virtualisation is vulnerable to a new type of malware.

According to this page, Joanna Rutkowska, a researcher into stealth malware, claims that AMD and Intel's virtualisation tech can be attacked and compromised at a high level of "stealth".

The test malware Rutkowska created, called Blue Pill allow for a completely new class of malware if the kernel is accessed, she claims.

"Industry best practices" cannot prevent abuse of hardware virtualisation once the kernel is accessed, she said.

But even though the debate rages on, we're advised by a source familiar with these matters that a hypervisor program could easily be written that installs in Windows XP if you have Pacifica or Intel virtualisation enabled. So perhaps this truly is a bit of a storm in a teacup, once the little bit of code is created. By AMD. Or Intel. µ