I have a program which I've been using for over a year that I recently discovered is laced with a virus. I do not want to reformat the entire computer mostly because even if I backed up the data, I wouldn't be able to tell if I'm porting the virus infected files with me.
So, if I were to create a new Virtual Machine, then run the infectious program, is there any way to pinpoint which files it has infected? (I.E. running a diff on the system and seeing what has changed?)
2nd question:
VMs are wholly and completely insulated from the outer system, correct?
There is no way for this virus to be run on the VM, and infect the main system? In my case, the outer system is already infected, so no big deal, but I was wondering if it was theoretically possible to write a virus that would infect the host systems while being run in a VM?