I was scambaiting and I let an Indian Geek Squad scammer access my isolated virtual machine. On my virtual machine, my VPN was on and network discovery and file sharing were turned off on my VM. But when the scammer said “Cleek on all dee positive options surr”, I clicked the “Allow” on a pop-up generated by LogMeIn Rescue. It might have looked something like this:
I assume of course you’re not keeping anything personal on a bait computer. That being said, theoretically, the guest system, or host system, is totally isolated by the VM and cannot even “see” the host, let alone attack it; so the guest cannot break out of the VM. Of course, in practice, it has occasionally happened (web archive link). An attack requires exploiting a security issue (i.e. a programming bug which turns out to have nasty consequences) in the VM implementation or, possibly, the hardware features on which the VM builds on. There are few exit routes for data out of the VM; e.g., for Internet access, the VM is emulating a virtual network card, which deals only with the lowest level packets, not full TCP/IP – thus, most IP-stack issues remain confined within the VM itself. So bugs leading to breakout from VM tend to remain rare occurrences. When rebooting it’ll simply load the previous image devoid of any changes.
