Category Archives: CVEs

VMware Windows Tools Vulnerability Causes Authentication Bypass (CVE-2025-22230)

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This article peeked my interest due to the nature of it being a VMware vulnerability. Between the fact that I worked for VMware for many years and I was just working inside VMware Workstation Pro building out a Windows environment the last few days made me take a second look on this article.

The bigger company and more widely used your products, the more it makes you a target for hackers. This just proves no matter how much they may dedicate to securing software, there is always someone smarter and with the time and resources to find a way in!

Below article written by Sergiu Gatlan…

Broadcom released security updates today to fix a high-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware Tools for Windows.

VMware Tools is a suite of drivers and utilities designed to improve performance, graphics, and overall system integration for guest operating systems running in VMware virtual machines.

The vulnerability (CVE-2025-22230) is caused by an improper access control weakness and was reported by Sergey Bliznyuk of Positive Technologies (a sanctioned Russian cybersecurity company accused of trafficking hacking tools).

Local attackers with low privileges can exploit it in low-complexity attacks that don’t require user interaction to gain high privileges on vulnerable VMs.

“A malicious actor with non-administrative privileges on a Windows guest VM may gain ability to perform certain high-privilege operations within that VM,” VMware explains in a security advisory published on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Broadcom also patched three VMware zero days (CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226), which were tagged as exploited in attacks and reported by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.

As the company explained at the time, attackers with privileged administrator or root access can chain these vulnerabilities to escape the virtual machine’s sandbox.

Days after patches were released, threat monitoring platform Shadowserver found over 37,000 internet-exposed VMware ESXi instances vulnerable to CVE-2025-22224 attacks.

Ransomware gangs and state-sponsored hackers frequently target VMware vulnerabilities, as VMware products are widely used in enterprise operations to store or transfer sensitive corporate data.

For instance, in November, Broadcom warned that attackers were exploiting two VMware vCenter Server vulnerabilities: a privilege escalation to root (CVE-2024-38813) and a critical remote code execution flaw (CVE-2024-38812) identified during China’s 2024 Matrix Cup hacking contest.

In January 2024, Broadcom also disclosed that Chinese state hackers had used a critical vCenter Server zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-34048) since late 2021 to deploy VirtualPita and VirtualPie backdoors on affected ESXi systems.

SOURCE ARTICLE:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/broadcom-warns-of-authentication-bypass-in-vmware-windows-tools/?utm_source=tldrinfosec

(3) ESXi Zero Day Vulnerabilities: CVE-2025–22224/22225/22226

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Written By: Kevin Beaumont

March 4th, VMware quietly released patches for three ESXi zero day vulnerabilities: CVE-2025–22224, CVE-2025–22225, CVE-2025–22226.

Although the advisory doesn’t explicitly say it, this is a hypervisor escape (aka a VM Escape). A threat actor with access to run code on a virtual machine can chain the three vulnerabilities to elevate access to the ESX hypervisor.

This is backed up by VMware’s official Github, which says:

Yes, this is being actively exploited in the wild.

Once you have ESX access, you can access everything on the ESX server — which includes things such as VM data, and crucially ESX config and mounted storage. Using ESX config and mounted network storage, you can traverse the VMware environment.

My pretty diagram:

Feel free to use this carefully prepared graphic to brief your board or the public

For example, orgs use vMotion to allow virtual machines to automatically move across ESX hosts, to balance load and allow for maintenance without downtime (it’s how VMware security patching works). Because of this, a threat actor has direct access to storage of VMs both on and not on that host by design — they’re basically loose on the backend.

Areas of concern

ESXi is a ‘black box’ environment, where you don’t have EDR tools and such — it is locked down. As such, a hypervisor escape means a threat actor is outside of all security tooling and monitoring. They can, for example, access Active Directory Domain Controller databases without triggering any alerts anywhere in the stack, or delete data.

This is frequently seen in ransomware incidents, where people directly exploit the ESX server or vCenter server over the VMware management network using unpatched vulnerabilities. Once they reach ESX, they reach directly into storage across the whole cluster.

However, being able to reach the ESX server hypervisor directly from the Virtual Machine significantly raises the risk. For example, you don’t need to find the ESX server details, or reach a segregated network.

‘But Kevin’ you may say ‘if a threat actor gained access to a VM it’d be game over’. Well… not so much. Threat actors gain access to endpoints all the time in any large org, e.g. malware initial access on end user PCs. When you have VDIs on VMware, you have a problem. When you have shared servers on VMware, you have a problem. Compromise one of system in a company is not usually a big problem in the short term. Immediate compromise of all of them is a big problem.

Additionally, there are around 500 Managed VMware providers, who operate as effectively clouds, allowing SMBs to purchase fully managed VMs, on demand compute basically. A compromise of one customer VM would allow compromise of every customer VM in the same managed provider.

This also applies to companies who have built their own Private Clouds using VMware, and use VMware to segregate business units.

Versions impacted

The Broadcom advisory is currently incomplete for some reason. For example VMware’s Github lists versions 6.5 and 6.7 as impacted, and patches are available on VMware’s website — but VMware’s advisory on the Broadcom site doesn’t list them as impacted as of writing. Basically, every release of ESX is impacted.

I understand 5.5 is also impacted, however it is out of support so no patch is available.

Continue reading article here!

ChatGPT – SSRF Vulnerability (CVE-2024-27564)

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ChatGPT Vulnerability

Threat actors are targeting a year-old server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in a third-party ChatGPT tool, mainly against financial entities and US government organizations, cybersecurity firm Veriti reports.

The affected tool is called ChatGPT, but it’s not made by OpenAI. Instead, it’s an open source tool created by a Chinese developer, designed to provide an interface for interacting with the ChatGPT gen-AI service.

The bug, tracked as CVE-2024-27564, is a medium-severity issue affecting the pictureproxy.php file. It allows attackers to inject crafted URLs in the url parameter and force the application to make arbitrary requests.

Reported in September 2023 and publicly disclosed one year ago, the flaw can be exploited without authentication, and has had proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code available publicly for some time.

According to Veriti, at least one threat actor has added an exploit for CVE-2024-27564 to its arsenal, and has started probing the internet for vulnerable applications.

Within a single week, the cybersecurity firm observed over 10,000 attack attempts coming from a single IP address. Roughly one-third of the targeted organizations are potentially at risk of exploitation due to misconfigurations in their protection solutions, Veriti warns.

Most of the attacks were targeting organizations in the US, mainly in the government and financial sector. Financial and healthcare firms in Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, Colombia, and the UK were targeted as well.

“Banks and fintech firms depend on AI-driven services and API integrations, making them vulnerable to SSRF attacks that access internal resources or steal sensitive data,” Veriti notes.

Although a medium-severity issue, CVE-2024-27564 has become a real-world attack vector and organizations should address it as soon as possible. They should also check their intrusion prevention systems and firewalls for any misconfigurations and monitor logs for known attacker IP addresses.

“Ignoring medium-severity vulnerabilities is a costly mistake, particularly for high-value financial organizations,” Veriti says.

*updated to clarify that the ChatGPT tool impacted by CVE-2024-27564 is not in any way related to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

SOURCE ARTICLE: Click Here!

Palo Alto Networks Tags New Firewall Bug

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Palo Alto Networks warns that a file read vulnerability (CVE-2025-0111) is now being chained in attacks with two other flaws (CVE-2025-0108 with CVE-2024-9474) to breach PAN-OS firewalls in active attacks.

The vendor first disclosed the authentication bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-0108 on February 12, 2025, releasing patches to fix the vulnerability. That same day, Assetnote researchers published a proof-of-concept exploit demonstrating how CVE-2025-0108 and CVE-2024-9474 could be chained together to gain root privileges on unpatched PAN-OS firewalls.

A day later, network threat intel firm GreyNoise reported that threat actors had begun actively exploiting the flaws, with attempts coming from two IP addresses.

CVE-2024-9474 is a privilege escalation flaw in PAN-OS fixed in November 2024 that allows a PAN-OS administrator to execute commands on firewalls with root privileges. Palo Alto Networks warned at the disclosure that the vulnerability was exploited as a zero-day.

CVE-2025-0111 is a file read vulnerability in PAN-OS, allowing authenticated attackers with network access to the management web interface to read files that are readable by the “nobody” user.

The CVE-2025-0111 flaw was also fixed on February 12, 2025, but the vendor updated its bulletin today to warn that it is also now being used in an exploit chain with the other two vulnerabilities in active attacks.

“Palo Alto Networks has observed exploit attempts chaining CVE-2025-0108 with CVE-2024-9474 and CVE-2025-0111 on unpatched and unsecured PAN-OS web management interfaces,” reads the updated bulletin.

While Palo Alto Networks has not shared how the exploit chain is being abused, BleepingComputer has been told they could be chained together to download configuration files and other sensitive information.

Continue reading →

Apple Fixes Zero-Day Vulnerability – Update ASAP!

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Apple has released an emergency security update for a vulnerability which it says may have been exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.”

The update is available for:

  • iOS 18.3.1 and iPadOS 18.3.1 – iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 13-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later
  • iPadOS 17.7.5 – iPad Pro 12.9-inch 2nd generation, iPad Pro 10.5-inch, and iPad 6th generation

If you use any of these then you should install updates as soon as you can. To check if you’re using the latest software version, go to Settings (or System Settings) > General > Software Update. It’s also worth turning on Automatic Updates if you haven’t already, which you can do on the same screen.

Technical details

The new-found zero-day vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025-24200. When exploited, the vulnerability would allow an attacker to disable USB Restricted Mode on a locked device. The attack would require physical access to your device

The introduction of USB Restricted Mode feature came with iOS 11.4.1 in July 2018. The feature was designed to make it more difficult for attackers to unlock your iPhone. When USB Restricted Mode is active, your device’s Lightning port (where you plug in the charging cable) will only allow charging after the device has been locked for more than an hour. This means that if someone tries to connect your locked iPhone to a computer or other device to access its data, they won’t be able to do so unless they have your passcode.

To enhance data security, especially when traveling or in public places, it is recommended that you enable USB Restricted Mode in your device settings. If your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch is running iOS 11.4.1 or later, USB Restricted Mode is automatically on by default, but if you want to check and enable USB Restricted Mode, this can be done by going to Settings > Face ID & Passcode or Touch ID & Passcode > (USB) Accessories and toggling off (grey) the (USB) Accessories option. Enabling this setting adds an extra layer of protection against unauthorized data access.

Please note: toggling the option to green turns this feature off.

Vulnerabilities like these typically target specific individuals as deployed by commercial spyware vendors like Pegasus and Paragon. This means the average user does not need to fear attacks as long as the details are not published. But once they are, other cybercriminals will try to copy them.

Source Article:

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/apple-fixes-zero-day-vulnerability-used-in-extremely-sophisticated-attack?utm_source=iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=b2c_pro_oth_20250217_februaryweeklynewsletter_v3_173948923242&utm_content=Apple_fixes

Understanding CVE-2025-1094: PostgreSQL Exploit Risks (US Treasury)

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A high-severity SQL injection bug in the PostgreSQL interactive tool was exploited alongside the zero-day used to break into the US Treasury in December, researchers say.

Rapid7’s principal security researcher, Stephen Fewer, disclosed CVE-2025-1094 (8.1) on Thursday, saying it was a key part of the exploit chain that also included the BeyondTrust zero-day (CVE-2024-12356).

In fact, CVE-2025-1094 was so important to the chain that the BeyondTrust attack couldn’t have been pulled off without it, we’re told.

“Rapid7 discovered that in every scenario we tested, a successful exploit for CVE-2024-12356 had to include exploitation of CVE-2025-1094 in order to achieve remote code execution,” said Fewer.

“While CVE-2024-12356 was patched by BeyondTrust in December 2024, and this patch successfully blocks exploitation of both CVE-2024-12356 and CVE-2025-1094, the patch did not address the root cause of CVE-2025-1094, which remained a zero-day until Rapid7 discovered and reported it to PostgreSQL.”

According to Rapid7’s director of vulnerability intelligence, Caitlin Condon, CVE-2025-1094 affects all versions of the PostgreSQL interactive tool, but, fortunately, it isn’t particularly simple to exploit. Given the complexity of the exploit pattern, Rapid7 doesn’t expect attacks to be carried out away from the BeyondTrust versions already known to be vulnerable.

She said via Mastodon: “But with the above said, it’s clear that the adversaries who perpetrated the December attack really knew the target technology, which is yet another example of a zero-day exploit trend Rapid7 started tracking in 2023.”

The vulnerability in the PostgreSQL interactive tool (psql) can lead to arbitrary code execution (ACE) and there is also a technique to exploit it independently from CVE-2024-12356. Rapid7 said BeyondTrust’s patch for its zero-day didn’t address the root cause of the psql bug, but it does prevent the two from being exploited together.

The psql vulnerability can be exploited because of an incorrect assumption that a SQL injection attack can’t be carried out when a malicious input is safely escaped via PostgreSQL’s string escaping routines, Fewer said.

Source Article:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/postgresql_bug_treasury/?utm_source=tldrinfosec