Broadcom warned today that a trio of VMware zero days are being exploited in the wild – and can be used to “escape” from a virtual machine (VM) to the underlying hypervisor itself, with root privileges.
Yes, that’s a “yikes.” That's potentially a hacker going from compromising a meagre single VM to your entire VMware private cloud.
Moderately less “yikes” is the fact that to exploit them an attacker would already need local administrative privileges on a guest operating system – but that doesn't mean someone sitting in your office; plenty of VMs are remotely accessible and all it would take is for one person with that access's Windows 11 box (example) to be popped to be compromised.
Broadcom described the security advisory as an “emergency” change.
The trio of vulnerabilities, allocated CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS 9.3), CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS 8.2), and CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS 7.1), affects a sweeping range of VMware products and versions, including ESXi (9.3, 8.2, 7.1, 6.7. 6.5 and earlier), Workstation, Cloud Foundation, and Telco Cloud Platform. Not everyone gets a fix. Broadcom noted:
"A patch has been released for ESX 6.7 and is available via the Support Portal to all customers. ESX 6.5 customers should use the extended support process for access to ESX 6.5 patches.Products that are past their End of General Support dates are not evaluated as part of security advisories, and are not listed in the official VMSA. Broadcom strongly encourages all customers using vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 to update to vSphere 8.
You have to update and reboot
“There are no other meaningful workarounds that do not involve updating and restarting VMware ESX” warned Broadcom in an advisory.
“VMware recommends the use of vMotion to relocate [VMs] to alternate hosts while you update, in a ‘rolling reboot’ fashion. [VMs] that do not use vMotion will need to be powered down during the host restart.”
Broadcom said of the vulnerabilities:
"A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine may exploit this issue to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host" – CVE-2025-22224
"A malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process may trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox" – CVE-2025-22225
"A malicious actor with administrative privileges to a virtual machine may be able to exploit this issue to leak memory from the vmx process" – CVE-2025-22226
VMware advisory links
VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2025-0004 (the security advisory itself)
VMSA-2025-0004 Questions & Answers (this document’s shortened ink)
vSphere Security Configuration & Hardening Guides (the reference for hardening VMware vSphere, virtual machines, and in-guest settings like VMware Tools)
VMware Cloud Foundation Security Advisories (list of all disclosed security vulnerabilities)
VMware Security Advisory Mailing List (please subscribe for proactive notifications of security advisories)
Best Practices for Patching VMware vSphere (advice for ensuring patching success)
VMware Ports & Protocols & VMware vSphere Firewalling Helper (assistance in determining ingress & egress firewall rule sets)
VMware vSphere Critical Patch Downloads (support.broadcom.com)
VMware Telco Cloud Platform users may need to move to a patched version of ESXi – this may involve “moving to a newer version of VMware Telco Cloud Platform (TCP)” flagged Broadcom in its advisory. (The vulnerabilities were reported by Microsoft Threat Intelligence.)
VMware is often targeted by ransomware groups and APTs alike. It was not immediately clear how widespread exploitation was.
See also: Bonkers VMware vulnerability abused in ransomware attacks
There are currently 28 VMware vulnerabilities listed in CISA’s catalogue of “known exploited” bugs. Among the others recently known to be exploited by ransomware groups are CVE-2024-37085. That “bonkers” vulnerability is the result of the expansive permissions granted by VMware to a group called ‘ESX Admins’ that it creates by default when users opt to manage their VMware hypervisor hosts via Active Directory.
These permissions, per, continue to exist in “ghost form” even if a conscientious administrator restricts them or deletes the group.
Mass exploitation of ESXi vulnerability CVE-2021-21974 meanwhile was reported in January 2023. In June 2023 Mandiant warned a VMware zero day affecting ESXi hypervisors and allocated CVE-2023-20867 was being exploited by a Chinese APT to gain lateral movement capabilities across VMware environments without leaving a trail or any logs of their activity.
