When you procure a malware sample from various sources such as honeypots, or online repositories, or an infected machine, your first task is to transport it to an environment where the malware can be observed in action without harming any real-world computer system and especially via network communication or propagation. This is normally called a sandbox or a malware lab and should be set up prior to analysis.

Dedicated computer hardware can certainly be used for this purpose, though a better solution would be to use virtualization or emulation. The dividends are rich and multivalent—you recoup on the price of real computer hardware and OS backup software while you capitalize on features such as snapshots, persistent disks, host only networking, kernel mode debugging over named pipes, and running multiple OS versions on the same hardware.

VMWare and VirtualBox are two virtualization software that can be leveraged in such a setup. For our purposes, this would...