Re: Am I paranoid?

["Karl E. Jorgensen" <karl@jorgensen.org.uk>]

Hi

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 01:14:10PM +0100, ha wrote:
> I have a relatively new installation (2 months) of Debian Wheezy,
> and not many additionaly packages installed. I *never* installed any
> virtual machine on this computer, however, after some problems (that
> I first though were hardware related) I found that vmtoolsd is
> installed on this computer.

I cannot see a package named "vmtoolsd" in the debian archives. But I
can see a package named "open-vm-tools", which has files named like
that:

https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&searchon=contents&keywords=vmtoolsd

This package seems to be the VMware Tools bit intended to be installed
on a guest VM - i.e. it does not provide virtualisation, but does
stuff guests...

Is your box a VMWare guest? If not, then you should not need open-vm-tools.

> Synaptic does not show any installed VM package, same as my shell history.
> 
> I'm aware that virtualization theoretically could be used to gain
> backdoor (or at least processing power) and I wonder if I'm the
> lucky one. I'm willing to explore this if anybody is interested to
> lead me.

I would not suspect this to be the case here. If you have the
open-vm-tools package from the Debian repository, you should be safe.

Hope this helps
-- 
Karl E. Jorgensen