Suspected China-Nexus Actor Exploits VMware vCenter Flaw, Deploys Babuk
QUIRSO attributes exploitation of VMware vCenter CVE-2026-59310 to a suspected China-nexus actor that hit 361 IPs in 47 countries, deploying backdoors and Babuk.
German incident response firm QUIRSOS assessed with moderate confidence that a suspected China-nexus actor, likely operating in UTC+08:00 hours, exploited VMware vCenter flaw CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8 directory traversal) beginning five days after Broadcom's July 29 patch. The campaign compromised 361 unique victim IPs across 47 countries, most in Germany, the US, Turkey, Iran, and France. The actor abused cron jobs, a XOR-obfuscated 'linuxFile' WebSocket backdoor with systemd/cron persistence, a JSP web shell, SSH authorized-keys manipulation, and a reverse SSH tool, with one Babuk deployment reported. A separate vCenter 'vcenter_admin' account creation consistent with CVE-2026-59309 exploitation was also observed from August 1.
CISA: Critical VMware RCE flaw now exploited by ransomware gangs
CISA warns ransomware gangs now exploit critical VMware vCenter syslog RCE CVE-2026-59310, already KEV-listed after APT compromises across 47 countries.
Broadcom patched critical directory traversal flaw CVE-2026-59310 in the vCenter Syslog server on July 29, warning of unauthenticated remote code execution. QUIRSO subsequently found 361 compromised IPs across 47 countries after a suspected APT deployed a reverse SSH tool for persistence and remote access. CISA added the flaw to its KEV catalog with a three-day patch deadline for federal agencies, and over the weekend updated it to flag active abuse by ransomware gangs. Shadowserver tracks over 450 exposed vCenter servers, and CISA has tagged 26 VMware vulnerabilities as exploited in the wild over five years, nine abused by ransomware.
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.