virtualbox.org

Useful as this feature is, there remains a problem, as far as I can see, with permissions (does anyone have any other take on this?) Any new directory or file created on the Linux host by the Windows guest (at least my Win2K guest) is created with the inflexible set of permissions rw-------. I.e no permissions for groups or others, only for the owner. That's not very convenient if you have a Windows process producing files that you want to be readable by a network group. I know running a Samba server on the Linux host allows the permissions of the client-created files to be forced to any required mask, but the file share feature of Virtualbox is so convenient, it's a shame (if I'm correct) that permissions can't be similarly forced, to make it a really useful feature.

It's a known issue. They are still investigating how to change that, without causing any security issues on the Host. It should indeed be atleast rw-r-----, so the owner can modify it, the group read it.