Thousands of VMware Center servers vulnerable to remote attacks

A Chinese security researcher reports that an unaddressed flaw in vCenter Server, the centralized management utility for VMware, leaves thousands of servers vulnerable to remote attacks without the need for user interaction,  according to Cyber Defense Magazine. VMware has issued an advisory on the vulnerability, designated CVE-2021-21972. “VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Critical severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 9.8,” the advisory said. “A malicious actor with network access to port 443 may exploit this issue to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts vCenter Server.” Bad Packets employees have reported an increase in activities searching for vulnerable servers in the aftermath of the flaw’s publication. A query of the Shodan search engine turns up more than 6,700 VMware vCenter servers that are potentially vulnerable to the flaw and can be found online.