Mac Trojan Flashback.B Checks for VM

[AMD_Gamer]

I thought this was pretty interesting. A trojan that detects if the OS is virtualized and does not run if it is. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002251.html

 

[Astronomica]

http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf

This is pretty good light reading for the topic. You can actually trick malicious software that wouldn't otherwise run on a VM into thinking it's actually the host. Or if you're into reverse engineering protected software you can also thwart detection from some of the various settings on page 23, at the great expense of performance.