IT security vendor Symantec Corp. and Intel Corp. are collaborating to bring the benefits of virtualization technology to desktop security, executives from the two companies announced at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Symantec will release, next year, a new intrusion prevention system (IPS) called Virtual Security Solution, which is installed on a virtual machine running on PCs with Intel vPro technology. Computers equipped with vPro technology, and loaded with Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor, use hypervisor to create a virtual machine running alongside the host operating system, explained Leo Cohen, vice-president and fellow at Symantec’s security technology group. By taking the intrusion prevention system and running it on a virtualized environment, security controls become independent of the operating environment and less vulnerable to targeted attacks aimed at weakening or disabling security controls in an operating system, said Cohen.