When will the madness end? In the circle of cyber crime, a hacker stole what is allegedly VMWare source code from a Chinese company. It’s not clear how the Chinese company, which has ties to China’s military, obtained the source code, but I could venture a few guesses.
In a rare move VMWare confirmed the leak of the circa 2003-04 code, but downplayed the seriousness or potential risk. The leaked source code is a part of VMWare’s ESX virtual machine software program, a virtualization tool for creating cloud environments.
With cloud-based solutions in continued demand across the federal government, and many of them powered by VMWare, it’s a leak worth noting, even if the security implications for today are small. The fact that the leak became known after being stolen from one hack to the next is also a sign of the times, where the battle for intellectual property, insider information and vulnerabilities is fast and furious. Expect more news announcements like this in the future, as both the U.S. and master hackers follow cyber threats to their source.
