Pierluigi Paganini January 29, 2023

Horizon3’s Attack Team made the headlines again announcing the release of a PoC exploit code for remote code execution in VMware vRealize Log.

Researchers from the Horizon3’s Attack Team announced the release of PoC exploit code for remote code execution in VMware vRealize Log.

The PoC exploit code will trigger a series of flaws in VMware vRealize Log to achieve remote code execution on vulnerable installs.

VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight) is a log collection and analytics virtual appliance that enables administrators to collect, view, manage and analyze syslog data. Log Insight provides real-time monitoring of application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages and performance data.

The availability of an exploit like the one announced by the Horizon3’s Attack Team is a bad news for organizations, a threat actor can develop its own version to gain initial access to targets’ networks and perform a broad range of malicious activities.

“This vulnerability is easy to exploit however, it requires the attacker to have some infrastructure setup to serve malicious payloads. Additionally, since this product is unlikely to be exposed to the internet, the attacker likely has already established a foothold somewhere else on the network.” reads a post published by Horizon3’s Attack Team. “This vulnerability allows for remote code execution as root, essentially giving an attacker complete control over the system.”

This week VMware addressed multiple vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2022-31706, CVE-2022-31704, CVE-2022-31710, and CVE-2022-31711, in its vRealize Log Insight appliance.

The most severe flaws impacting the product are a Directory Traversal Vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-31706 (CVSS score 9.8), and a broken access control vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-31704 (CVSS score 9.8).

An unauthenticated, attacker can exploit one of the two flaws to inject files into the operating system of an impacted appliance which can result in remote code execution.

“An unauthenticated, malicious actor can inject files into the operating system of an impacted appliance which can result in remote code execution.” reads the advisory published by the virtualization giant.

The other flaws fixed by VMware are:

• CVE-2022-31710 – Deserialization Vulnerability (CVSS score 7.5) that can be exploited by a remote attacker to trigger the deserialization of untrusted data which could result in a denial of service.
• CVE-2022-31711 – Information Disclosure Vulnerability (CVSS score 7.5) which can be exploited by a remote attacker to collect sensitive session and application information without authentication.

The post published by the Horizon3’s Attack Team researchers also includes a list of indicators of compromise (IOCs) that can be used to detect exploitation attempts for the above issues.

“Gaining access to the Log Insight host provides some interesting possibilities to an attacker depending on the type of applications that are integrated with it. Often logs ingested may contain sensitive data from other services and may allow an attack to gather session tokens, API keys, and PII.” continues the post. “Those keys and sessions may allow the attacker to pivot to other systems and further compromise the environment.”

The experts used the Shodan search engine and discovered only 45 VMware vRealize Log Insight appliances that are exposed online.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, VMware vRealize Log)