VMware this week announced the availability of patches for an authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware Carbon Black App Control (AppC) running on Windows machines.
Carbon Black App Control is designed to improve the security of servers and other critical systems by locking them down to prevent unauthorized tampering.
The newly addressed security hole, the company says, could be exploited by an attacker to gain unauthenticated administrative access to the application.
However, even if the attacker doesn’t need valid credentials for the target application, they would still have to first gain network access to the VMware Carbon Black App Control management server for the attack to succeed, VMware explains in an advisory.
Tracked as CVE-2021-21998, the vulnerability is considered critical, with a CVSS score of 9.4.
VMware notes that there are no workarounds to mitigate this vulnerability. However, software updates have been released to address it and users are advised to apply those as soon as possible.
Fixed releases include VMware Carbon Black App Control (AppC) 8.6.2 and 8.5.8, along with a hotfix already available for the 8.1.x and 8.0.x versions of AppC. Users need to log into the Carbon Black UEX Portal to download the necessary files.
VMware says the vulnerability was reported privately.
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