I noticed that in the Networking and Sharing center, I have multiple networks. One is Local Area Connection, and under its properties, ‘avast! Firewall NDIS Filter Driver’ is listed. Avast detected this network and asked me to configure a network profile for it. I also have 2 networks from VMware. One is VMware Network Adapter VMnet1, and the other is VMware Network Adapter VMnet8. They both do not have ‘avast! Firewall NDIS Filter Driver’ listed under their properties. (See screenshot) Avast did not detect these 2 networks.
I uninstalled and reinstalled, and tried repairing, but still no driver. Is this normal? If it is, then why does the VMWare network adapter not need to be protected by the firewall? Can a worm/virus travel through these 2 networks to my real machine? And can a hacker attack these 2 networks? Please forgive my ignorance, I’m new to VMware. Thank you.
PS. I installed the virtual machine (Windows 7 32bit) with default settings. If it got infected, will it affect my real machine?
Forgive my ignorance because I don’t use the AIS product and have limited experience with VMware but I think you’d probably have to install AIS on the virtual machines in order to protect them.
I don’t know why avast wouldn’t protect the network connections to the other machines, but I can assume that it’s just because they are virtual interfaces and not real ones.
Since you have Avast installed on the host machine, it would protect your computer from anything trying to come from the virtuals, and obviously wouldn’t allow viruses to go out to the virtuals as well.
So basically, you’re still protected pretty well, and I don’t know if Avast plans on creating NDIS filter drivers for VMWare virtual network adapters or not. Since it’s a software connection and not a hardware one, I don’t even know if it’s possible.
Again, since I have limited knowledge on this I could be wrong. That’s just the way that I think of it being.
Yes, I’m sure that if you have Avast installed on the host system, it’s not going to allow anything to “cross-over” to your machine without letting you know about it first. The network shield and on-access scanners will let you know of that pretty quickly.
Now we just need an avast developer to step in and tell us if there is a way or even a need to protect virtual interfaces created by VMWare. I’m going to bet that they don’t need it since the system will be protected by the various other shields, and they probably wouldn’t be able to create a driver for a virtual interface anyway. I don’t even know if VMWare releases the code for their virtual network connections, so it might be impossible for developers to create filter drivers for them.