VMware Fixes Vulnerability That Earned Researcher $100,000 at Hacking Contest
VMware has patched a critical Workstation and Fusion vulnerability disclosed recently by a researcher at a hacking competition in China.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2018-6983, was demonstrated last week by Tianwen Tang of Qihoo 360’s Vulcan Team at the Tianfu Cup PWN competition. The white hat hacker earned $100,000 for his work.
It’s worth noting that participants received over $1 million for 30 vulnerabilities disclosed at the Tianfu Cup event, including $120,000 for two Oracle VirtualBox exploit chains.
The flaw affecting VMware Workstation and Fusion has been described as an integer overflow bug affecting virtual network devices. Exploiting this weakness can allow a guest to execute arbitrary code on the host.
The vulnerability affects Workstation 14.x and 15.x on any platform, and Fusion 10.x and 11.x on macOS. Patches have been released for each of the impacted versions on November 22, less than a week after disclosure.
VMware informed customers before the start of the hacking competition that it had sent representatives to the event to review any vulnerabilities that may be demonstrated.
This is not the first vulnerability patched by VMware this month after it was disclosed at a hacking competition in China. On November 9, the company notified customers of fixes for a critical virtual machine (VM) escape vulnerability presented by a researcher in late October at the GeekPwn2018 competition.
Related: Patches Released for Flaws Affecting Dell EMC, VMware Products
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Related:VMware Patches Code Execution Flaw in AirWatch Agent
Related:VMware Patches VM Escape Flaw Disclosed at Chinese Hacking Contest
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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