Technology
Threat posed by new VMware hyperjacking vulnerabilities is hard to overstate
Just one compromised VM can make all other VMs on that hypervisor sitting ducks.
Ars Technica
published: Mar 05, 2025
Three critical vulnerabilities in multiple virtual-machine products from VMware can give hackers unusually broad access to some of the most sensitive environments inside multiple customers’ networks, the company and outside researchers warned Tuesday.
The class of attack made possible by exploiting the vulnerabilities is known under several names, including hyperjacking, hypervisor attack, or virtual machine escape. Virtual machines often run inside hosting environments to prevent one customer from being able to access or control the resources of other customers. By breaking out of one customer’s isolated VM environment, a threat actor could take control of the hypervisor that apportions each VM. From there, the attacker could access the VMs of multiple customers, who often use these carefully controlled environments to host their internal networks.
All bets off
“If you can escape to the hypervisor you can access every system,” security researcher Kevin Beaumont said on Mastodon. “If you can escape to the hypervisor, all bets are off as a boundary is broken.” He added: “With this vuln you’d be able to use it to traverse VMware managed hosting providers, private clouds orgs have built on prem etc.”
Read More