And for almost as long, security researchers have warned about the potential dark side of that technology: theoretical “hyperjacking” and “Blue Pill” attacks, where hackers hijack virtualization to spy on and manipulate virtual machines, with potentially no way for a targeted computer to detect the intrusion.Today, Google-owned security firm Mandiant and virtualization firm VMware jointly published warnings that a sophisticated hacker group has been installing backdoors in VMware’s virtualization software on multiple targets’ networks as part of an apparent espionage campaign.By planting their own code in victims’ so-called hypervisors—VMware software that runs on a physical computer to manage all the virtual machines it hosts—the hackers were able to invisibly watch and run commands on the computers those hypervisors oversee.Researchers say they’ve seen the group carry out their virtualization hacking—a technique historically dubbed hyperjacking in a reference to “hypervisor hijacking”—in fewer than 10 victims’ networks across North America and Asia.But the company gives that claim only a “low confidence” rating, explaining that the assessment is based on an analysis of the group’s victims and some similarities between their code and that of other known malware."