Self-propagating cloud-aware distributed agents for benign cloud exploitation

摘要

A virtual computing architecture protection system, and a method for monitoring a virtual computer system, comprising: a first agent 24A having a controller component 26 for propagating one or more further agent 24B; a data store component 36 for storage of data pertaining to computational nodes VM1, VM2 of the virtual computing architecture; and one or more sensor component 28 arranged to sense data communications between virtual computing applications on one or more node, wherein the first agent controller is arranged to interpret the sensed data communications and to query the data store to identify a computational node of the virtual computing architecture that is susceptible to agent propagation, the first agent controller propagating and deploying the further agent on the said computational node once identified. The first agent may be configured to determine if a first or further agent is already installed on the identified computational node.