As of March 4, 2025, Shadowserver found that over 41,500 internet-exposed VMware ESXi hypervisors are vulnerable to the actively exploited CVE-2025-22224.

By infosecbulletin
/ Monday , March 17 2025
A recent report from Elastic reveals that threat actors misuse Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Notification Service (SNS) for malicious...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Saturday , March 15 2025
Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler found and reported a non-password-protected database with over 86,000 records belonging to ESHYFT, a New Jersey-based...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Friday , March 14 2025
Forescout Research- Vedere Labs identified a series of intrusion based on two Fortinet vulnerabilities which began with the exploitation of...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Thursday , March 13 2025
GitLab has released versions 17.9.2, 17.8.5, and 17.7.7 for its Community and Enterprise Editions to fix security vulnerabilities, including a...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Thursday , March 13 2025
Cisco has issued a security advisory for a high-severity vulnerability in its IOS XR Software, labeled CVE-2025-20138, with a CVSS...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Wednesday , March 12 2025
GreyNoise warns of a coordinated increase in the exploitation of Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities across various platforms. "At least...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Wednesday , March 12 2025
NVIDIA has released a software update for Riva to fix security vulnerabilities that could allow privilege escalation, data tampering, denial...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Wednesday , March 12 2025
On Tuesday, Apple fixed a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting nearly all supported iPhones and iPads. The company noted that it...
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Wednesday , March 12 2025
Microsoft's March 2025 Patch Tuesday update fixes 57 flaws, including seven zero-day exploits, six of which are actively being exploited....
Read More
By infosecbulletin
/ Tuesday , March 11 2025
Cato CRTL team said, a new botnet campaign dubbed Ballista target the unpatched TP-Link Archer routers. CVE-2023-1389 is a serious...
Read More
41,500 unpatched ESXi instances represent a major part of global virtualization, especially in healthcare, finance, and telecommunications.
Broadcom released an emergency update to fix a vulnerability that allows attackers with local admin access to a virtual machine (VM) to run malicious code on the hypervisor, posing serious risks to cloud infrastructure and enterprise networks.
Hypervisor Escape via TOCTOU Flaw:
CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS 9.3) is a TOCTOU vulnerability found in VMware ESXi and Workstation. It lets attackers cause an out-of-bounds write in the VMX process, which manages individual VMs.
Exploitation occurs when an attacker gains administrative access to a virtual machine’s guest operating system, allowing them to escalate privileges to the host system. This gives them complete control over all virtual machines on the hypervisor, data stores, and connected networks.
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center found vulnerabilities and informed Broadcom, highlighting their use in ransomware and APT campaigns. The U.S. CISA added CVE-2025-22224 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list on March 4, requiring federal agencies to fix it by March 25, 2025.
Mitigations:
Broadcom released patches for all affected products, including:
VMware ESXi 8.0: Update to ESXi80U3d-24585383 or ESXi80U2d-24585300
VMware ESXi 7.0: Update to ESXi70U3s-24585291
VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x/4.5.x: Apply async patches detailed in KB389385.
Organizations should quickly isolate ESXi management interfaces from the internet, review VM administrative access, and monitor unusual VMX activity. Rapid7 and Tenable have added detection checks in their platforms to find exposed systems.