now i’m thinking that overhead or booting up a vm app is of no relevance to me, if i am secure on the web…if the vm gets corrupted, simply revert it back or scrap it and use an identical back up…

now…i’m exhausted, fed-up, 60 years old and becoming more senile by the minute…but i’m not “that” stupid…is there a vm build available that i can download and simply run and browse with…doing all the functions one normaly wood…

1. go to yahoo e-mail…
2. download and open pdf, doc and xls files, etc…?

it appears this vm should be so simple, yet there are no step by step instructions available to someone who has no “language speak” experience…all hints and tips are missing half the information…

this vm things seems to make so much sense and be so powerful, in terms of blocking access to your primary OS or programs…

thanks in advance…christoph

That being said, there are other options. Instead of incurring the hassle and overhead of a virtual pc, one can use sandbox and behavior control technologies to restrict the ability of common applications to act as transmission mediums for viral and other attacks. For example, DefenseWall is a sandboxing technology that isolates web browsers and the like, limiting their privileges to the mimimum necessity. Additionally, applications like Cyberhawk and PrevX use behavior analysis and control techniques to detect and stop malicious code. By these means, new threats can be identified and thwarted in real time without the need for “updates” and signature databases. As a matter of fact, sandboxing and HIPS are the primary protection methods I use for my day-to-day activities, virtualization of an entire pc is only necessary when I intend to surf uncharted and questionable territories (in which case I fire up my vmware ubuntu browser ‘appliance’ and revert it back to prior state when I’m done).

The question of whether it is a tedious solution to viruses is different from whether it is effective.

The problem with anti-virus software is that it continues to fail. Keeping it updated is tedious in itself, and even if it is updated it may not catch a virus that it does not know about.

In general, this is the shortcoming of the “patch the problem” approach. It’s not really fixing the root cause of the problem. This is why I think you’ll start to see more fundamental security mechanisms making their way into mainstream usage in the next ten years or so.

I think the original post’s intent was that using a VM is a clever use of today’s technology to produce an anti-virus mechanism that is more fundamentally sound than the plain old “update more often, scan more often, hope you don’t miss anything” solution.

I think this is tedious to maintain many images and making the machine overloaded is over kill. The simplest solution would be to use the updated anti-virus and some kind of personal filrewall and spyware detectors.

=Venkat