The flaw, which affected the virtual machine monitor (VMM) in Virtual PC, could enable an attacker to use applications running in user-space on a guest OS to access portions of the Virtual PC memory that should be inaccessible to those applications.

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For those tracking the growing malicious elements on the Web, Chrome's innovation--and GreenBorder's contribution to the open-source browser--is a technology known as "sandboxing, " a tactic that limits Web applications' access to a computer's memory beyond a virtual border.

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Flash memory offers fast ways to cache and serve up digital content to support high usage virtual machine environments.

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Gamers cannot customise consoles, but they can, and do, upgrade their PCs regularly with faster processors, graphics cards, extra memory, and anything else that will give them an edge over their opponents on the virtual field of honour.

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Techniques such as extracting operating parameters, comparing application profiles across VMs (to look for signs that one has been successfully attacked), and analyzing application behavior in memory (as opposed to just code stored on disk) are far easier in a virtual environment and provide a huge advantage for stopping the most sophisticated threats.

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