- CISA added CVE-2025-41244 to KEV, mandating patching by November 20
- The bug permits native privilege escalation by way of VMware Instruments with SDMP enabled
- Chinese language group UNC5174 exploited it for espionage concentrating on Western and Asian establishments
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company (CISA) has added a brand new Broadcom bug to its Identified Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, warning Federal Civilian Government Department (FCEB) companies about in-the-wild abuse.
The bug in query is a neighborhood privilege escalation vulnerability affecting VMware Aria Operations and VMWare instruments. Based on the NVD, a malicious native actor with non-administrative privileges gaining access to a VM with VMWare Instruments put in and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled might exploit it to escalate privileges to root on the identical VM.
The bug is tracked as CVE-2025-41244, and was given a severity rating of seven.8/10 (excessive). These searching for a repair for Home windows 32-bit ought to search out VMWare Instruments 12.4.9, a part of VMWare Instruments 12.5.4. For Linux, there’s a model of open-vm-tools that shall be distributed by Linux distributors.
Chinese language attackers
By including it to KEV, CISA gave FCEB companies a three-week deadline to use the patch (which was printed roughly a month in the past) or cease utilizing the susceptible merchandise totally. The deadline is November 20.
On the identical time, safety researchers are saying that the bug was being leveraged by Chinese language state-sponsored criminals for roughly a yr now. In truth, NVISO claims {that a} group tracked as UNC5174 has been utilizing it since mid-October 2024, and even launched proof-of-concept (POC) code to show the way it might be leveraged, BleepingComputer studies.
Based on Google Mandiant, UNC5174 was employed by China’s Ministry of State Safety (MSS) to acquire entry to US protection contractors, UK authorities companies, and completely different Asian establishments.
In late 2024, Chinese language state-sponsored menace actors abused a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Cloud Providers Equipment (CSA) units to entry French authorities companies, in addition to quite a few business entities corresponding to telcos, finance, and transportation organizations. The assaults had been attributed to a gaggle tracked as Houken which, researchers claimed, bears many similarities to UNC5174.
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