Patent 9489516 was granted and assigned to Palo Alto Networks on November, 2016 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Various techniques for detection of malware using an instrumented virtual machine environment are disclosed. In some embodiments, detection of malware using an instrumented virtual machine environment includes instantiating a first virtual machine in the instrumented virtual machine environment, in which the first virtual machine is configured to support installation of two or more versions of a resource; installing a first version of the resource on the first virtual machine and monitoring the instrumented virtual machine environment while executing the first version of the resource with a malware sample opened using the first version of the resource; and installing a second version of the resource on the first virtual machine and monitoring the instrumented virtual machine environment while executing the second version of the resource with the malware sample opened using the second version of the resource.