Malware can now detect virtual machines, and then go dark like a Cold War spy

One of the more effective ways to counter a malware infection is to make sure that it infects something that can’t have much of an influence on the rest of the system, like a sandboxed virtual machine. However as malware continues to evolve, its creators are now discovering ways to detect whether it is simply wasting its time infecting virtual machines, so it can go after more legitimate targets.