Can a virus or trojan on a guest 2000 virtual machine
infect the host XP machine ??????????
If you share a disk for transferring files between them,
the W2K malware can easily drop a virus there that fires
when XP tries to execute the file or a macro in the file.
If you have a virtual network, the W2K malware can attack XP
just as if it was a seperate w2K box attacking an XP box.
Put a virtual firewall between them to avoid this.
A future virus or trojan may be able to dicover a flaw that lets
it escape. Separate physical hardware with no network connection
is the only sure way to isolate all possible malware.
That being said, in real life VMWare is pretty good at isolating
malware, and if one ever escapes you can restore the system from
backup. (if you don't have backups or have not done a practice
restores to an unformatted HD, using VMWare would be like putting
a case-hardened deadbolt on a carboard box.)
Read these webpages:
http://advosys.ca/viewpoints/2006/04/virtualization-insecurity/
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid14_gci1247329,00.html
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/reference/Virtual_Machine_Threats.pdf
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/backdoor.html
http://securitytracker.com/alerts/2005/Dec/1015401.html
http://secunia.com/advisories/13871/
Guy Macon
<http://www.guymacon.com/>