VMware fixed a high-severity bug in vCenter Server

VMware this week addressed a severe vulnerability in vCenter Server that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

VMware on Thursday released security patches to address a code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-31680 (CVSS score of 7.2), in vCenter Server.

The security issue is an unsafe deserialization vulnerability that resides in the platform services controller (PSC).

“The vCenter Server contains an unsafe deserialisation vulnerability in the PSC (Platform services controller). VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.2.” reads the advisory published by the company. “A malicious actor with admin access on vCenter server may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary code on the underlying operating system that hosts the vCenter Server.”

This vulnerability impacts only vCenter Server 6.5 with an external PSC, it was addressed with the release of VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U3u.

The flaw was reported by Cisco Talos researcher Marcin Noga.

Reported by Cisco Talos security researcher Marcin Noga, the vulnerability was addressed with the release of VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U3u.

VMware also addressed a a null-pointer dereference vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-31681 (CVSS score 3.8), in the VMware ESXi bare metal hypervisor.

A threat actor with privileges within the VMX process only, may create a denial of service condition on the host.

The issue was reported by VictorV (Tangtianwen) of Cyber Kunlun Lab.

The virtualization giant addressed the vulnerability with the release of versions ESXi70U3sf-20036586, ESXi670-202210101-SG, and ESXi650-202210101-SG. The company added that Cloud Foundation (ESXi) is also impacted by this issue.

The company is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the above vulnerabilities.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, vCenter Server)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.