UNC5174 exploits VMware privilege escalation zero-day in wild
Free public brief. The indicators, the detections with Splunk SPL already written (plus Elastic and KQL where they apply), and a Slack alert the next time this touches a vendor you run are in the app — free account, no card.
Zero-day CVE-2025-41244 in VMware Tools and Aria Operations exploited by UNC5174 since October 2024; allows root privilege escalation.
Multiple privilege escalation vulnerabilities have been discovered in VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools, with the most critical being CVE-2025-41244. This vulnerability has been actively exploited in the wild since mid-October 2024 by the China-linked threat actor UNC5174. A local attacker with non-administrative privileges on a guest VM running vulnerable VMware Tools and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled can escalate privileges to root, achieving full system compromise.
Additionally, CVE-2025-41245 allows unauthorized credential disclosure of other Aria Operations users, and CVE-2025-41246 permits authenticated access to other guest VMs if the attacker possesses vCenter or ESX credentials. Affected versions include VMware Cloud Foundation Operations prior to 9.0.1.0, VMware Tools prior to 13.0.5.0/13.0.5/12.5.4, and VMware Aria Operations prior to 8.18.5. Immediate patching is critical, particularly for organizations running these components in multi-tenant or high-privilege environments.
Defenders should prioritize immediate patching, implement network segmentation to isolate critical systems, enforce least-privilege access controls, and conduct vulnerability scanning to identify affected systems in their infrastructure.
Mentioned in this report
Detection guidance
VMware Tools Service Discovery Spawning Binary From User-Writable Path
VMware Tools (vmtoolsd) or its service-discovery script launching an executable from /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm or /home, consistent with CVE-2025-41244 local root privilege escalation. Auto-generated starting point — validate and tune in your environment before deploying. IOC matches can false-positive on shared infrastructure and decay as adversary infrastructure rotates.
title: VMware Tools Service Discovery Spawning Binary From User-Writable Path
id: 5fba22f3-025f-55e7-8faa-8576b5b7e860
status: experimental
description: Detects vmtoolsd or the VMware service discovery script (get-versions.sh)
launching an executable from a user-writable directory such as /tmp, /var/tmp, /dev/shm
or /home. This matches the CVE-2025-41244 pattern, where an unprivileged user plants
a binary that the root-running VMware Tools service discovery then executes. Generalises
on the parent/child relation and the writable path, not on a specific binary name.
references:
- https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-vmware-aria-operations-and-vmware-tools-could-allow-for-privilege-escalation_2025-092
tags:
- attack.privilege-escalation
- attack.t1068
logsource:
category: process_creation
product: linux
detection:
selection_parent_tools:
ParentImage|endswith:
- /vmtoolsd
- /vmware-toolbox-cmd
Image|startswith:
- /tmp/
- /var/tmp/
- /dev/shm/
- /home/
selection_parent_script:
ParentCommandLine|contains: get-versions.sh
Image|startswith:
- /tmp/
- /var/tmp/
- /dev/shm/
- /home/
condition: 1 of selection_*
falsepositives:
- Administrators deliberately running custom VMware Tools scripts that live under
/home or /tmp
- Software installed in a home directory that is legitimately discovered by Aria Operations
service discovery
level: high
author: Vorant
Behavioural rules are generated from public reporting — validate in your environment before deploying.
Source reporting: https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities-in-vmware-aria-operations-and-vmware-tools-could-allow-for-privilege-escalation_2025-092
What this brief leaves out
This page is the free tier: the write-up, the severity, the names. In the app the same report carries its extracted indicators, its detections (Splunk SPL already written, plus Elastic and Microsoft KQL where they apply), the actors and CVEs it names as live profiles, and the vendor research on the same campaign — the primary source the news paraphrased, cited and read directly.
It sits in a corpus of 13,854 reports from 146 sources, 616 of them written in the last seven days, and it grows through the day.
A new account starts with three days of all of it, no card, then keeps the government and CERT reporting free. Name the vendors you run and Slack hears about the reports that touch them — about forty a week that are yours, not the four hundred that are not.
Create a free account What it costs