Whether they call them canaries, monkeys, or guinea pigs, more security companies are using virtual PCs to protect users.

Miners learned to love the humble canary. After a mine fire or explosion, miners would descend with the birds to possibly dangerous areas. The canaries’ high metabolism made them the first succumb if significant amounts of carbon monodixe or methane were present, thus giving miners warning of unsafe areas so they could escape alive.

Security companies are now applying the same theory into the online world.
Using thousands of virtual Pcs, systems whose processors, memory, and hard drives are all emulated in software, McAfee’s SiteAdvisor, Mircosoft’s research arm, and other groups have automated the process of going into the unsafe areas of the Web. If a site hosting malicious code compromises one of the virtual PCs, the site’s address is recorded for further investigation, the virtual machine is erased, and a new virtual machine is set up in its place. Pretty neat stuff eh?

Some security companies refer to the virutal PCs as canaries or guinea pigs, or by the technical term, client-side honeypots. Microsoft calls them honeymonkeys in reference to the million-monkeys theorem. The theorem says that a million monkeys typing random characters on a million typewriters for an infinite period of time can evenutally produce the complete works of William Shakespeare…lol

Though it’s unlikely that a million monkeys could every write a Shakespares’ play, they most certainly could help to secure the Web. Today, tens of thousands of virtual machines are crawling the Internet, clicking on untrusted links, getting compromised, being deleted, and the doing it all over again. How cool is that?

Various Companies are pursuing different plans for the technology. Mircosoft uses its honeymonkey system to research threats to Windows and map out the links connecting to malicious Web sites - a part of the Internet that its researchers refer to as the ExploitNet. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ues the resulting database of bad sites as one component of its Web site ratings, accessible through free plug-ins for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Easy, cheap virtualisation software is the key to the technology. Mircosoft and SiteAdvisor both run thousands of virtual PCs with management servers capable of cataloging sites. The virtual PC, which almost always runs Mircosoft Windows, appears to malicious software to be a normal, albeit vanilla, PC. The latest Trojan horses, spyware, and the Web viruses infect the virtual system without detecting that it is really a sterile environment that will quickly be deleted. How sweet is that.

Yet the attackers are adapting to security methods such as virtual PCs. Some are working on ways to detect virtual machines by creating software for exactly that purpose; if a virtual machine is detected, they avoid infecting that system in order to delay exposure. Other attackers are identifying major Web sites that have a type of flaw known as cross-site scripting. This essentially allows an attacker to load malicious code on a victim’s machine from another Web site while the user believes he/she is still browsing safely on the orginal trusted Web site.

Despite the arms race that continues between attackers and defenders, virtual PCs promise to automate the patrol of the Web for malicious Web sites. In the end, we may come to appreciate the automated monkeys of the Web as much as miners appreciated the canary.