This week the “Venom” vulnerability was announced, affecting a number of virtualization systems, like Xen, KVM, and VirtualBox (http://www.zdnet.com/article/venom-security-flaw-millions-of-virtual-machines-datacenters/). Hackers can use the defect to exploit flaws in code written more than 10 years ago, a virtual floppy disk controller, to shut down the hypervisor. With the hypervisor disabled, a hacker would then able to access the virtual machines of other people or companies running on the same server.

Prior to Wednesday’s announcement software makers developed patches to close the door to the exploit, but not all hosting providers have been able to roll the patch out to their affected systems. As a result, a number of virtualization platforms running these distributions remain vulnerable to possible exploits.

Since our systems are built on VMware, DataYard’s cloud infrastructure is not vulnerable to this exploit. Microsoft’s Hyper-V and Bochs are also not affected by this bug.