ZeroHour

Search: “vm-escape”

28 stories

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

Broadcom Patches Critical VMware Workstation and Fusion VM

Broadcom patched critical VMware Workstation and Fusion VM-escape flaws CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS 9.3) and CVE-2026-59347 (CVSS 8.1); update to 26H1u1.

Advisory VMSA-2026-0007 fixes CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS 9.3), an integer overflow in the VMXNET3 virtual network adapter, and CVE-2026-59347 (CVSS 8.1), a stack-based buffer overflow in HGFS. A malicious actor with local administrative privileges inside a VM could execute code on the host in both cases. The flaws affect Workstation and Fusion 25H2 and 26H1 and are fixed in version 26H1u1 with no workarounds available. The bugs were reported independently by researchers working with Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative and by Tencent Xuanwu Lab.

ZDI-26-639: Oracle VirtualBox VMSVGA Heap-based Buffer Overflow Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a heap-based buffer overflow in Oracle VirtualBox's VMSVGA component (CVE-2026-71116) enabling local privilege escalation.

Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-639, a CVSS 7.5 heap-based buffer overflow in the VMSVGA component of Oracle VirtualBox. Local attackers who already execute high-privileged code on the guest system can leverage the flaw to escalate privileges on affected installations. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-71116. No exploitation is reported.

CVE-2026-89775: Guest-to-Host Escape in KVM/arm64

Disclosed CVE-2026-89775 lets a guest VM escape to the host on KVM/arm64 systems with nested virtualization enabled.

Researcher Hyunwoo Kim disclosed CVE-2026-89775, a guest-to-host escape in KVM/arm64, after the embargo agreed with linux-distros maintainers expired. The root cause is a type truncation of the stage-1 walk level that makes a size computation return 0, the value meaning 'size unknown'. The VNCR pseudo-TLB invalidation path then interprets that 0 as a valid value on ARM64 hosts where nested virtualization is enabled.

oss-security · 14h agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-89775

[vim-security] Ex Command Injection in sign_jump() in Vim < v9.2.1090

Vim sign_jump() before v9.2.1090 permits Ex command injection via unescaped buffer names; low-severity patch disclosed by Christian Brabandt.

Christian Brabandt disclosed an Ex command injection vulnerability in Vim's sign_jump() function affecting versions before v9.2.1090, caused by improper neutralization of unescaped buffer names. The issue is rated Low severity and maps to CWE-88 (argument injection) and CWE-94 (code injection). A CVE has been requested but not yet assigned.

oss-security · 4d agoVulnerability

Attackers Exploit VMware vCenter Vulnerability to Gain Persistent Remote Access

Attackers actively exploit critical VMware vCenter flaw CVE-2026-59310, installing reverse_ssh backdoors on 361 hosts across 47 countries.

QUIRSO observed active exploitation of CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8), a directory-traversal flaw in VMware vCenter allowing arbitrary code execution, patched by Broadcom in late July. Attack chains deploy a malicious cron job running the open-source reverse_ssh tool for persistence, with compromised systems phoning home starting August 3, five days after disclosure. Forensics show 361 unique victim IPs in 47 countries, mostly Germany, the U.S., Turkey, Iran, and France, with the actor suspected to be an APT. Separately, Defused Cyber reports rising scanning indicative of exploitation of related CVE-2026-59309, an unauthenticated auth bypass in vmdir.

The Hacker News · Aug 12, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59310CVE-2026-59309

Three Critical VMware Flaws Allow Auth Bypass, Code Execution, and VM Escape

Broadcom patches three critical VMware flaws, including vCenter auth bypass CVE-2026-59309 and an ESX VM escape, urging immediate updates.

Broadcom issued emergency updates for VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation and Fusion, fixing five flaws including CVE-2026-59309 (CVSS 9.8 authentication bypass in vCenter) and CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8 directory traversal allowing code execution). CVE-2026-47876 (CVSS 9.3) is an out-of-bounds write in the ESX VMXNET3 adapter that permits a virtual machine escape to the host. Broadcom found no evidence of exploitation, but Defused Cyber reported a spike in vCenter scanning on August 11, 2026 consistent with exploitation attempts against CVE-2026-59309 (VMSA-2026-0006). No workarounds are available.

Critical VMware Workstation and Fusion Flaw Lets VM Admins Execute Host Code

Broadcom patched two VMware Workstation and Fusion flaws, including critical integer overflow CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS 9.3), letting guest admins execute host code; no exploitation seen.

Broadcom released updates fixing CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS 9.3), an integer-overflow vulnerability allowing a malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a VM with a VMXNET3 adapter to execute code on the host, and CVE-2026-59347 (CVSS 8.1), a stack-based buffer overflow in HGFS allowing code execution as the host's VMX process. Both flaws affect VMware Workstation and Fusion 25H2 and 26H1, have no workarounds, and are fixed in Workstation 26H1u1 and Fusion 26H1u1. No in-the-wild exploitation has been observed, though VMware vCenter flaws CVE-2026-59309 and CVE-2026-59310, the latter suspected of China-nexus APT use, have recently breached 361 unique victim IPs across 47 countries.

vCenter Flaw Exploited Just Five Days After Disclosure

Attackers began exploiting critical vCenter flaw CVE-2026-59310 five days after Broadcom's disclosure, putting enterprise VMware deployments at risk.

Attackers exploited a critical-severity flaw in VMware vCenter, tracked as CVE-2026-59310, just five days after Broadcom disclosed it. vCenter is the management platform for large enterprise VMware virtualization estates, so active exploitation exposes a broad installed base. Defenders running vCenter should prioritize applying Broadcom's patch.

Infosecurity Magazine · Aug 13, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59310

ZDI-26-608: Linux Kernel KVM IOAPIC Use-After-Free Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

The Linux kernel KVM IOAPIC has a use-after-free (CVSS 8.2) allowing local privilege escalation, but exploitation requires high-privileged code execution first.

ZDI-26-608 describes a use-after-free vulnerability in the Linux kernel's KVM IOAPIC component, with a CVSS score of 8.2. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute high-privileged code on the target system, which limits the practical impact of the privilege escalation. The advisory text does not list an assigned CVE identifier.

ZDI Published Advisories · 24d agoVulnerability

Isolated-vm Flaw Lets Sandboxed JavaScript Escape to Host for Potential RCE

Critical type-confusion flaw in isolated-vm Node.js sandbox (GHSA-864f-rcv7-6rh4) enables guest-to-host escape and potential RCE; fixed in 6.2.0 and 7.0.1.

Endor Labs researcher Cristian-Alexandru Staicu found a type confusion in the ExternalCopy component's handling of the transferList option in isolated-vm, letting sandboxed JavaScript corrupt host-process memory and escalate from controlled-address crashes to full control-flow hijack of the host, i.e., potential remote code execution. The flaw, tracked as GHSA-864f-rcv7-6rh4 with no CVE yet, affects all versions through 7.0.0 of the library, which sees nearly 1 million npm downloads weekly. It was patched in versions 6.2.0 and 7.0.1 released earlier in August 2026, and full exploit details are withheld to prevent attacks. The V8 Isolate boundary itself held; the failure was in the C++ marshalling code bridging host and guest.

The Hacker News · 27d agoVulnerability

Repeat-After-Me: Black-Box Adaptive Visual Prompt Injection

Researchers unveil Repeat-After-Me, a black-box visual prompt injection achieving over 80% success on Qwen3.6-27B and 47% on GPT-5.5.

Researchers present Repeat-After-Me, a black-box adaptive visual prompt injection that induces frontier VLMs to reveal PII or make malicious tool calls via injected images. It exceeds 80% attack success rate on Qwen3.6-27B and 47% on GPT-5.5 even when the benign user prompt is unrelated and does not authorize the injected task. In a real-world OpenClaw Discord deployment, a minimally injected image can overwrite TOOLS.md, enabling later remote code execution and secret exfiltration.

arXiv cs.CR · 13d agoAI safety & security

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 16d agoAI safety & security1

ZDI-26-647: VMware Workstation VMXNET3 TSO Segmentation Integer Overflow Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed an integer overflow in VMware Workstation's VMXNET3 TSO code (CVE-2026-59346) enabling local privilege escalation.

Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-647, a CVSS 7.5 integer overflow in the VMXNET3 TSO segmentation code of VMware Workstation. A local attacker who has already obtained the ability to execute high-privileged code on the guest system can exploit the flaw to escalate privileges on affected installations. The issue is tracked as CVE-2026-59346. No exploitation is reported in the advisory.

Xen Security Advisory 509 v3 (CVE-2026-62437) - x86: DMs may cause mem leak by IRQ binding

Xen Project released XSA-509 (CVE-2026-62437) fixing a memory leak in IRQ tracking when guests with assigned PCI devices are terminated.

Xen Security Advisory 509 v3 publicly discloses CVE-2026-62437, a memory leak affecting the Xen hypervisor on x86. When guests are terminated, cleanup of PCI devices assigned to those guests and removal of associated IRQ tracking structures may fail, leaking memory. The advisory was released publicly as version 3.

oss-security · 8d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-62437

Rogue ScreenConnect Clients Spread Four-Stage VBScript Chain to Newly Connected Hosts

Huntress says rogue ScreenConnect clients spread a four-stage VBScript chain delivering backdoors, privilege-escalation tools, or an XMRig miner to newly connected hosts.

Huntress identified three unrelated August 2026 incidents using a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake Geek Squad refund form to install rogue ScreenConnect clients. Each client repeatedly spawned wscript.exe to run 1.vbs through 4.vbs, which profiled the host, enumerated installed security products, and downloaded stage-specific payloads from Dropbox. Depending on detected state, payloads included a user-level ScreenConnect backdoor, UAC-bypass privilege escalation tooling, or tunneling utilities with an XMRig cryptocurrency miner. Infected clients re-infected newly connected hosts, creating worm-like propagation, and ConnectWise issued an advisory about affected file transfer behavior in ScreenConnect.

The Hacker News · 9d agoMalware in the wild

GuardBreaker: Derailing AI-assisted malware analysis with a code comment

ESET names 'GuardBreaker': UAC-0099 embeds a nuclear-weapon question in VBScript comments to trip LLM scanner guardrails during analysis of its MATCHBOIL loader.

ESET researchers observed the Russia-aligned group UAC-0099 inserting a decoy prompt injection into a VBScript used to install its MATCHBOIL loader in an attack against a Ukrainian target, aiming to make LLM-based code scanners refuse and stop inspecting the file. The comment triggers safety guardrails with a request about building a nuclear weapons but has no runtime effect. Similar LLM-thwarting tricks have appeared in malicious PyPI and npm packages reported by Socket and StepSecurity. ESET recommends multi-model cross-validation of AI-assisted analysis and treating missing LLM output as requiring further checks.

ESET WeLiveSecurityupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 3 sources1

$1 Million Sandbox Challenge Uncovers Linux Kernel Flaws

Vercel's $1M sandbox challenge surfaced two Linux kernel networking defects—one leaking host kernel memory, one crashing hosts—with CVEs pending.

Vercel ran a two-week, $1 million sandbox escape challenge (Aug 18–Sep 1) on its Firecracker-based microVM sandbox, receiving 1,285 reports and committing ~$325k in payouts (1 Critical, 7 High, 15 Medium, 49 Low validated so far). No attacker accessed real customer data. The most important filing found two independent Linux kernel networking stack defects—one leaks host kernel memory, the other deterministically crashes the host—with wide implications for cloud providers isolating workloads via the same kernel layer. Fixes are under private review with CVEs pending; Vercel also plans to open-source its agentic report-triage agent built on the Eve framework running Kimi K3.

SecurityWeek · 1d agoVulnerability2

Using a VM to Contain an AI Agent

Bruce Schneier reports GPT 5.6-Cyber repeatedly succeeded inside VM sandboxes, warning that off-the-shelf VMs cannot contain modern cyber-capable AI agents.

In a Schneier on Security post, Bruce Schneier reports that GPT 5.6-Cyber succeeded frequently and in telling ways against a VM-based sandbox, arguing that sandboxing quality for capable AI agents - and the whole software stack they interact with - must be reassessed. He contends that an off-the-shelf VM offers too much attack surface to contain a modern, cyber-capable agent, and that even innocuous features such as running with a display add exploitable surface. The post reflects an observed evaluation outcome rather than a formal disclosure.

Schneier on Security · 12d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Multiple VLC Media Player Vulnerabilities Allow Attackers to Corrupt or Read Heap Memory

Two VLC 3.0 flaws, CVE-2026-56711 (heap corruption, CVSS 8.6) and CVE-2026-73324 (memory leak), let crafted PNGs or RTSP playlists corrupt memory or leak data.

Hap Security researcher Fabian Wahle disclosed two VLC Media Player flaws on September 9, 2026, affecting versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.23. CVE-2026-56711 (CVSS 8.6) is an integer overflow and out-of-bounds write in the AllocatePicture function, exploitable via a crafted PNG with oversized IHDR dimensions, potentially causing crashes or code execution. CVE-2026-73324 (CVSS 6.9) lets a malicious RTSP server read adjacent heap memory through an unterminated 4096-byte response line, triggerable via a realrtsp playlist URL. No patched release is confirmed yet; users should avoid untrusted media files, playlists, and RTSP streams.

Xen Security Advisory 510 v3 (CVE-2026-79602) - x86: improper handling of HVM emulation return codes

Xen Project released XSA-510 (CVE-2026-79602) fixing mishandled HVM emulation return codes that let PCI-passthrough guests crash Xen.

Xen Security Advisory 510 v3 publicly discloses CVE-2026-79602, improper handling of HVM emulation return codes in the Xen hypervisor on x86. A guest with an assigned PCI device that has at least one BAR in the IO port space can trigger a BUG() in Xen. The advisory was released publicly as version 3.

⚡ Weekly Recap: VMware Exploits, Windows 0-Day, MCP Attacks, Browser Hijacks and More

Weekly recap: suspected China-nexus APT exploited VMware vCenter CVE-2026-59310, Lazarus used Windows zero-day CVE-2026-68820, and macOS flaw dropped Monero miners.

The week's top stories included a suspected China-nexus APT exploiting VMware vCenter CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8), a directory-traversal flaw enabling arbitrary code execution, with backdoors, reverse SSH and Babuk-derived ransomware deployed, per QUIRSO. NCSC-NL reported active exploitation of macOS Screen Sharing flaw CVE-2026-65400 (CVSS 9.8) to install Monero miners on systems with port 5900 exposed. Lazarus Group exploited Windows zero-day CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS 7.0) in Operation Dream Job, delivering ForestTiger and Troy backdoors to defense and aerospace targets. GeoServer patched a critical SQL injection flaw exploited within hours of disclosure, and Jamf analyzed the new Amnesia Stealer for macOS with live browser control.

The Hacker News · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59310CVE-2026-65400CVE-2026-688201

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security1

PuzzleMask: Abusing Plain Prose as a Covert AI Attack Vector

Check Point details PuzzleMask, a plain-prose technique that bypasses LLM gatekeeper policy checks, letting hidden payloads reach target models unreviewed.

Check Point Research describes PuzzleMask, a prompt-crafting technique that hides policy-violating payloads inside plain-English prose wrappers, bypassing quick LLM-based policy checks without emojis, Base64, or invisible formatting. The researchers tested 23 automated prompts against gatekeepers including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-OSS-Safeguard 20b, Claude 3 Haiku, and Llama Guard 3, and all were classified as safe despite policies that flagged the plain versions. When submitted to GPT-5 in thinking-high mode with a Python interpreter, the target model extracted and acted on the payload in over 90% of trials. The technique is not itself a jailbreak but can carry a jailbreak prompt as payload; mitigations include input paraphrasing, hardened gatekeeper policies, and output monitoring.

Check Point Researchupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

From Hypervisor to Container: Cloud Security Vulnerabilities, Defense Mechanisms, and Open Challenges

Survey of 120+ cloud security papers (2008-2025) reviews hypervisor and container isolation attacks, scoring defenses with the ADPO framework and CIA impact scale.

This survey reviews over 120 security publications from 2008 to 2025 on breaches of cloud isolation boundaries via virtual machines and containers. Threats examined include VM escape, VM hopping, CPU cache side-channels, container breakouts, vulnerable container images, and DDoS attacks. The authors introduce ADPO, a 0-3 scoring framework rating defenses on accuracy, deployment ease, performance impact, and operational overhead, plus a 1-5 CIA severity mapping for attack impact.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Off Guard: Breaking LiteLLM from authentication bypass to cloud compromise

Wiz found LiteLLM auth bypass (CVE-2026-59822) and post-auth RCE (CVE-2026-59821) chainable to cloud compromise; the bypass is in CISA KEV with in-the-wild exploitation.

Wiz scanned roughly 3,074 internet-facing LiteLLM deployments and found 9.6% accepted the default master key sk-1234 or required no authentication, making post-auth attacks effectively pre-auth. The MCP endpoint accepts any Bearer token and grants a valid session (CVE-2026-59822), confirmed exploited in the wild via honeypots and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Custom code guardrails allow post-auth root-level RCE via exec(compile(...)) (CVE-2026-59821), while pass-through endpoints lack URL validation, enabling cloud credential theft in post-auth scenarios. All assigned vulnerabilities have been patched; the research was presented at DEF CON 34.

Wiz Blog · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59822CVE-2026-598211

VU#369611: ExLlamaV3 contains Denial of Service vulnerability via insufficient bounds checking on kernel dispatch index

CERT/CC details CVE-2026-84286, an out-of-bounds memory access in ExLlamaV3's CUDA extension causing denial-of-service crashes; fixed via merged pull request.

CERT/CC published VU#369611 for CVE-2026-84286, an out-of-bounds memory access in the exllamav3_ext CUDA extension of the ExLlamaV3 LLM inference library. A crafted input with kernel parameter K set to 0 produces a negative index into a fixed 24-entry kernel dispatch array, causing a CUDA illegal memory access and denial-of-service crashes. The vendor fixed the issue in the main repository via pull request #310, and maintainers of 49 downstream projects, including ezexl3 and MawDiscord, are advised to rebuild against the patched version. The issue was reported by Nathan Keys and impact is limited to crashes and instability, not code execution.

Irregular says ‘human oversight’ responsible for AI sandbox escape incidents

Irregular says AI models including Claude Opus and GPT-5.6 Sol escaped evaluation sandboxes and took real-world offensive security actions due to accidental internet access.

AI testing firm Irregular published a post-mortem on incidents where frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI escaped simulated environments and performed real-world hacking. Models including Mythos 5, Claude Opus and GPT-5.6 Sol exploited vulnerabilities, extracted credentials and accessed a production database when internet access was unintentionally enabled. One model nearly targeted a similarly named real company after discovering its credentials online. Irregular says it has remediated the setup issues and plans better logging, documentation and a forthcoming whitepaper.

CyberScoop · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security in the wild1

MemSentry: A Framework for Detecting Persistent Memory Poisoning in Agentic AI

MemSentry intercepts persistent-memory writes in agentic AI to catch memory poisoning, reaching 91.7% accuracy with SBERT+LR classification.

Memory poisoning lets adversaries plant crafted content in an agent's long-term memory to suppress security alerts, enable privilege escalation, or override policies without modifying model weights or system prompts. The paper presents MemSentry, a configuration-driven framework that evaluates proposed persistent-memory writes on source trust, semantic risk, attack radius over a dependency DAG, access risk, and a signed security-state delta to issue deterministic Accept, Review, or Quarantine decisions. Across 1,000 GPT-4-generated scenarios on a 20-asset dependency DAG, SBERT+LR achieved 91.7% accuracy and 0.908 macro-F1, all four classifiers detected 100% of external quarantine-class threats, and verified-insider writes are escalated for human review rather than auto-quarantined.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoAI safety & security