Security News > 2023 > February > Ransomware scum launch wave of attacks on critical, but old, VMWare ESXi vuln

France's Computer Emergency Response Team has issued a Bulletin D'Alerte regarding a campaign to infect VMware's ESXI hypervisor with ransomware.
Targets don't come much richer than ESXi - the bare metal hypervisor can afford access to many guest machines that run apps and store data.
Thankfully, the ransomware deployed in this attack is a bit crap.
Pem The encryption process is specifically targeting virtual machines files The malware tries to shutdown virtual machines by killing the VMX process to unlock the files.
VMware warned on February 2 of an Arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in version 17.x of its Workstation desktop hypervisor.
CVE-2023-20854 is rated 7.8/10 as "a malicious actor with local user privileges on the victim's machine may exploit this vulnerability to delete arbitrary files from the file system of the machine on which Workstation is installed."
News URL
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/02/06/esxi_ransomware_campaign/
Related news
- Over 37,000 VMware ESXi servers vulnerable to ongoing attacks (source)
- US indicts 8Base ransomware operators for Phobos encryption attacks (source)
- RA World Ransomware Attack in South Asia Links to Chinese Espionage Toolset (source)
- Chinese espionage tools deployed in RA World ransomware attack (source)
- Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury (source)
- Lee Enterprises newspaper disruptions caused by ransomware attack (source)
- Southern Water says Black Basta ransomware attack cost £4.5M in expenses (source)
- Qilin ransomware claims attack at Lee Enterprises, leaks stolen data (source)
- Ransomware gangs exploit Paragon Partition Manager bug in BYOVD attacks (source)
- Hackers Exploit Paragon Partition Manager Driver Vulnerability in Ransomware Attacks (source)
Related Vulnerability
DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
---|---|---|---|
2023-02-03 | CVE-2023-20854 | Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in VMWare Workstation 17.0 VMware Workstation contains an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability. | 8.4 |