VMware this week acknowledged that hackers obtained access to some of its source code and posted it online, but the firm downplayed the impact of the breach.
In a statement, Iain Mulholland, director of VMware's Security Response Center, said his firm's security team became aware of the posting on Monday and said there is "the possibility that more files may be posted in the future."
The documents in question date back to 2003 and 2004, he said.
"The fact that the source code may have been publicly shared does not necessarily mean that there is any increased risk to VMware customers," Mulholland insisted. "VMware proactively shares its source code and interfaces with other industry participants to enable the broad virtualization ecosystem today. We take customer security seriously and have engaged internal and external resources, including our VMware Security Response Center, to thoroughly investigate. We will continue to provide updates to the VMware community if and when additional information is available."
The breach, which covered VMware's ESX virtualization product, was reportedly the work of a hacker known as Hardcore Charlie, who claims to have about 300MB of VMware source code, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky's Paul Roberts spoke with Charlie via an Internet Relay Chat (IRC), who said the VMware data dump can be traced back to a hack of email hosting company Sina.com. Charlie and fellow hacker @YamaTough cracked the cryptographic hashes used to secure the Sina information and hunted around for anything interesting. Eventually, they uncovered an account from the China Electronics Import
Source: PC World