Security News

CVE-2021-21974 is a vulnerability affecting OpenSLP as used in VMware ESXi. The French government's Computer Emergency Response Team CERT-FR was the first to raise an alert on ransomware exploiting this vulnerability on Feb. 3, 2023, quickly followed by French hosting provider OVH. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability remotely and unauthenticated via port 427, which is a protocol that most VMware customers do not use.

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Late last week, unknown attackers launched a widespread ransomware attack hitting VMware ESXi hypervisors via CVE-2021-21974, an easily exploitable vulnerability that allows them to run exploit code remotely, without prior authentication. Patches for CVE-2021-21974, a vulnerability in ESXi's OpenSLP service, have been provided by VMware two years ago, and this attack has revealed just how many servers are out there are still unpatched, with the SLP service still running and the OpenSLP port still exposed.

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.

Royal Ransomware is the latest ransomware operation to add support for encrypting Linux devices to its most recent malware variants, specifically targeting VMware ESXi virtual machines. The new Linux Royal Ransomware variant was discovered by Will Thomas of the Equinix Threat Analysis Center, and is executed using the command line.

VMware ESXi hypervisors are the target of a new wave of attacks designed to deploy ransomware on compromised systems. "A malicious actor residing within the same network segment as ESXi who has access to port 427 may be able to trigger the heap-overflow issue in OpenSLP service resulting in remote code execution," the virtualization services provider noted.

Admins, hosting providers, and the French Computer Emergency Response Team warn that attackers actively target VMware ESXi servers unpatched against a two-year-old remote code execution vulnerability to deploy ransomware. "As current investigations, these attack campaigns appear to be exploiting the vulnerability CVE-2021-21974, for which a patch has been available since 23 February 2021," CERT-FR said.

A relatively new ransomware operation known as Nevada seems to grow its capabilities quickly as security researchers noticed improved functionality for the locker targeting Windows and VMware ESXi systems. Nevada ransomware features a Rust-based locker, real-time negotiation chat portal, separate domains in the Tor network for affiliates and victims.

VMware released security updates to address a critical-severity vulnerability impacting ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation, and a critical-severity command injection flaw affecting vRealize Network Insight.The VMware ESXi heap out-of-bounds write vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-31705 and has received a CVSS v3 severity rating of 9.3.

A previously undocumented Python backdoor targeting VMware ESXi servers has been spotted, enabling hackers to execute commands remotely on a compromised system. VMware ESXi is a virtualization platform commonly used in the enterprise to host numerous servers on one device while using CPU and memory resources more effectively.