Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Data Protection

Vulnerability in VMware vSphere Replication Can Facilitate Attacks on Enterprises

VMware last week informed customers about the availability of patches for a potentially serious vulnerability affecting its vSphere Replication product.

vSphere Replication, a VMware vSphere component, is a virtual machine replication engine designed for data protection and disaster recovery.

VMware last week informed customers about the availability of patches for a potentially serious vulnerability affecting its vSphere Replication product.

vSphere Replication, a VMware vSphere component, is a virtual machine replication engine designed for data protection and disaster recovery.

VMware has told customers that several versions of the product are affected by a high-severity (important) command injection vulnerability that can be exploited by a hacker with admin privileges to execute shell commands on the underlying system.

“Successful exploitation of this issue may allow authenticated admin user to perform a remote code execution,” VMware said in its advisory.

The security hole is tracked as CVE-2021-21976. Patches have been released for each of the affected versions of vSphere Replication.

Egor Dimitrenko, the Positive Technologies researcher who discovered the vulnerability, told SecurityWeek that an attacker could obtain the access required for exploitation through, for example, social engineering or by hoping that the targeted admin account is protected by a weak password. Once the account has been accessed, exploitation of the vulnerability is not difficult, the researcher said.

“When carrying out an attack on a company infrastructure, an attacker can detect the VMware vSphere Replication instance at the perimeter of its network and, as the used password is weak, for example, he can guess credentials to enter the administrator interface,” Dimitrenko explained. “After gaining authorized access, the attacker will be able to exploit this vulnerability and execute arbitrary commands on the server with maximum privileges.”

“Having obtained the possibility of the execution of arbitrary commands on the server with maximum privileges, the attacker will be able to start further progress to seize full control over the company’s infrastructure,” he added.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Related: Russian Hackers Exploiting Recently Patched VMware Flaw, NSA Warns

Related: VMware Patches Vulnerabilities Exploited at Chinese Hacking Contest

Related: VMware Patches Workspace ONE Access Vulnerability Reported by NSA

Related: Patch for Critical VMware ESXi Vulnerability Incomplete

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing 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.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Protection

The cryptopocalypse is the point at which quantum computing becomes powerful enough to use Shor’s algorithm to crack PKI encryption.

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

Artificial Intelligence

The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST for post-quantum cryptography has been broken using AI combined with side channel attacks.

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

Vulnerabilities

A researcher at IOActive discovered that home security systems from SimpliSafe are plagued by a vulnerability that allows tech savvy burglars to remotely disable...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...