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Yes, it is entirely possible for software to break out of a virtual machine and run code on other VMs or the host. Isolating something in a virtual machine does provide rather good security, but none is perfect. Vulnerabilities have existed in many virtualization systems which allowed this to happen.

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Thanks, that actually stops me from trying to get the OS running.

However, why did gnu8 get downvoted? Seems like a reasonable comment, relevant to the discussion.

My guess is he was downvoted either for political reasons (by someone who's pro-Anonymous and mistakenly took his comment as a knock against them[1]), or because the downvoter wasn't security-savvy enough to know that gnu8's concern is legitimate.

[1] "Anonymous is not unanimous" and all that, but at the risk of No-True-Scotsmanning, either the distro is legitimately from Anonymous and contains no malware, or it contains malware and isn't legitimately from Anonymous (rather is intended as an attack against them).

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