Aikido Virtual Machine Scanning provides security scanning capabilities for virtual machines and containers in production environments. The tool offers both agentless and agent-based scanning options to identify vulnerabilities, outdated runtimes, and vulnerable packages. The agentless scanning approach operates by analyzing VM backups without requiring software installation on target systems, minimizing performance impact and bandwidth consumption. The system implements differential scanning that checks for changes and only downloads new versions when necessary, reducing bandwidth costs by up to 50%. The platform detects security risks that may bypass traditional CI/CD security checks, including manually deployed releases and undocumented changes. It scans what is actually installed on VMs and containers rather than relying solely on source code analysis. Aikido recalculates vulnerability severity scores based on the purpose and environment of each virtual machine, allowing teams to denoise results and adjust scanning frequency for non-production environments. The tool provides visibility into cloud security through a searchable cloud asset inventory feature. The platform integrates VM scanning with other security capabilities including dependency scanning, cloud security posture management, secrets detection, static and dynamic application security testing, infrastructure as code scanning, container image scanning, and runtime protection.