Quoting from IT Week:

Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Michigan (UOM) have created virtual-machine-based rootkits (VMBRs) to demonstrate how the security of virtual operating systems could be compromised.

This news may alarm companies using virtualisation to consolidate services onto commodity hardware with higher CPU utilisation rates; or firms using virtualised desktop operating systems to tackle security problems.

The research staff assumed "the perspective of the attacker who is trying to run malicious software (malware) and avoid detection", according to their paper entitled SubVirt: Implementing malware with virtual machines, which has been conditionally accepted for the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, which will be held in May.

Read the entire article, here.