In the movie The Incredibles, the daughter Violet has a specific superpower. She can create a protective force field around herself, an untouchable bubble and also make herself invisible.  Businesses around the world are trying to get rid of millions of dangerous cyber-attacks wishing they had the same superpower.  A cybersecurity firm called Bromium can protect laptop and desktop users against malware hidden in email attachments and compromised websites.  It does this through a process called micro-virtualisation.

“If Bromium can protect laptops and desktops users from hackers, why can’t Bromium protect cellphones from hackers?”, said Brooke Diamond.

Every time you would open a document or visit a website, Bromium creates a mini protected virtual environment for each task just like Violet’s untouchable bubbles. Even if you’ve clicked on an email link containing a virus, there’s nowhere for that malware to go because it is isolated within its protective bubble. It can’t infect the rest of the machine or penetrate the corporate network, sounds awesome right?

“If we could get the actual superpower like Violet to protect ourselves from everything it would be awesome”, said Hayley Palone.

Bromium co-founder and president Ian Pratt, who sold his first company XenSource to Citrix for $500 million in 2007, says it has taken his six years to perfect this product.One computer can have 50 virtual machines running at the same time without much loss in performance speed. “This is by far the hardest thing I’ve done by miles,” he tells the BBC.

“We’ve created a billion virtual machines since we started – no bad stuff has ever escaped from one of them,” says Mr Pratt. Microsoft has also been exploring the benefits of virtualisation. Its next major Windows 10 update will enable users to run the Edge browser.