Multiple Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in Broadcom VMware ESXi and Other Products

-

 Critical Zero-Day Alert: Broadcom Discloses 3 VMware Vulnerabilities with Active Exploits in the Wild


On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, Broadcom dropped a high-impact security advisory (VMSA-2025-0004) detailing three newly discovered zero-day vulnerabilities affecting several VMware products—ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion. The most severe, CVE-2025-22224, is a critical flaw in ESXi and Workstation that could allow attackers to break out of virtual machines and execute code on the host.

These aren’t remote exploits—they require local administrative access inside a guest virtual machine, but the risk is still significant. In real-world scenarios, a compromised VM could become a launchpad for deeper attacks into the hypervisor layer.


Breakdown of the Vulnerabilities:

🔴 CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS 9.3)

A Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) flaw in ESXi and Workstation. It can lead to an out-of-bounds write condition. An attacker with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine could exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host.

🟠 CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS 8.2)

A serious arbitrary kernel write issue in ESXi. With access to the VMX process, attackers can write to kernel memory and break out of the virtual environment.

🟡 CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS 7.1)

A vulnerability in VMware ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion allows an attacker with admin access to a virtual machine to exploit an out-of-bounds read in the Host Guest File System (HGFS), potentially leaking memory from the VMX process.

These flaws were responsibly reported by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, and Broadcom confirmed that active exploitation is already taking place. In response, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added all three CVEs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.

Broadcom notes that the vulnerabilities can be chained, allowing an attacker with control over a guest VM to escalate privileges and move into the hypervisor itself—a nightmare scenario for virtualized environments.

🔐 No Public Exploits Yet — But Don’t Wait

Although exploit code hasn't surfaced publicly, the potential impact is high. Given the popularity of ESXi among both enterprise environments and adversaries (especially ransomware groups), organizations are strongly urged to apply available patches immediately.

🧩 Affected Products

Vulnerable to CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226:

  • VMware ESXi 7.0 and 8.0

  • VMware Fusion 13.x

  • Vulnerable to CVE-2025-22226 only:

  • VMware Workstation 17.x

  • Vulnerable to CVE-2025-22224 and CVE-2025-22226:

  • VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure 2.x and 3.x

  • VMware Telco Cloud Platform (2.x to 5.x)

  • VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.x and 5.x


🚨 Heads up, VMware users! 🚨

Now you can quickly assess your exposure and stay one step ahead of potential threats before they become a real headache with InsightVM and Nexpose 💻🔍

Time to hit that scan button! 😉





REFERENCE: https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2025/03/04/etr-multiple-zero-day-vulnerabilities-in-broadcom-vmware-esxi-and-other-products/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hidden Lag Killing Your SIEM Efficiency

-
Image
  If your security tools feel slower than they should, you’re not imagining it. Many IT teams blame their sluggish SIEM performance on query complexity or alert volume. But sometimes the real issue is much simpler: oversized input files quietly dragging your system down. Think about the last time you had to sift through a bloated PDF or an unoptimised log dump. Every unnecessary megabyte adds strain. Every redundant line eats up cycles. Your SIEM doesn’t just react to threats—it processes all incoming data, relevant or not. When it starts lagging, detection gets delayed, triage slows, and in the high-stakes world of threat response, even seconds count. We often focus on analytics and rule tuning, but upstream efficiency—what you feed into your system—deserves just as much attention. This article looks at how optimising your inputs unlocks downstream performance. Why Oversized Files Clog the Pipeline As data volumes grow, organisations face esca lating  data storage costs ,...
Read more

Critical Vulnerability in Veeam Backup & Replication Exposes Enterprises to Remote Code Execution

-
Image
Critical Vulnerability in Veeam Backup & Replication Exposes Enterprises to Remote Code Execution By : Rei Ibraima A newly discovered critical vulnerability in Veeam’s Backup & Replication software, designated as CVE-2025-23120, poses a significant security risk to enterprise environments. The flaw allows authenticated domain users to execute arbitrary code remotely, potentially leading to full compromise of backup infrastructures. About CVE-2025-23120 The vulnerability arises from an insecure deserialization issue within Veeam Backup & Replication components—particularly in the .NET classes Veeam.Backup.EsxManager.xmlFrameworkDs and Veeam.Backup.Core.BackupSummary. Improper input validation in these components allows attackers to inject malicious serialized objects that are executed on the server side, resulting in Remote Code Execution (RCE). This issue affects systems where Veeam Backup & Replication is deployed in a domain-joined configuration, which—while common—is...
Read more

Lotus Panda Hacks SE Asian Governments With Browser Stealers and Sideloaded Malware

-
Image
The China-linked cyber espionage group tracked as Lotus Panda has been attributed to a campaign that compromised multiple organizations in an unnamed Southeast Asian country between August 2024 and February 2025. "Targets included a government ministry, an air traffic control organization, a telecoms operator, and a construction company," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "The attacks involved the use of multiple new custom tools, including loaders, credential stealers, and a reverse SSH tool." The intrusion set is also said to have targeted a news agency located in another country in Southeast Asia and an air freight organization located in another neighboring country. The threat cluster, per Broadcom's cybersecurity division, is assessed to be a continuation of a campaign that was disclosed by the company in December 2024 as a high-profile organization in Southeast Asia since at least October 2023. ...
Read more