Broadcom today pushed out patches for three VMware hypervisor-hijacking bugs, including one rated critical, that have already been found and exploited by criminals.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226, affect VMware ESXi, vSphere, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and Telco Cloud Platform. Updating to a fixed version will plug the holes.

Microsoft spotted and reported to Broadcom all three bugs, which can be chained together to escape a guest virtual machine and gain full control of the hypervisor and host system, which would be bad. To escape the guest, one needs to be an administrator within the VM.

“This is a situation where an attacker who has already compromised a virtual machine’s guest OS and gained privileged access (administrator or root) could move into the hypervisor itself,” according to a Q&A about the CVEs.

The first and most critical flaw, CVE-2025-22224, is VCMI heap-overflow vulnerability that leads to an out-of-bounds write. It received a 9.3-out-of-10 CVSS rating. An attacker with local administrative privileges on a VM can abuse this hole to execute code as the Virtual Machine Executable (VMX) process running on the host.

The second, CVE-2025-22225, is an 8.2-rated arbitrary write vulnerability. A miscreant with privileges within the VMX process can use this to trigger an arbitrary kernel write, which then leads to VM escape.

And the third bug, CVE-2025-22226, is a 7.1-rated information-disclosure vulnerability that can be exploited to leak memory from the VMX process. 

Again, as with all three of the CVEs, the attacker must already have admin-level privileges on the VM to abuse this flaw. If you allow customers to bring their own guest VM and have admin access within it, this is a problem. If you control all your guests, it’s less of problem. Hopefully your org has defenses in place to prevent an intruder or rogue customer or insider from getting to the point where they can exploit these three holes and compromise a hypervisor host server. 

But regardless: Update and restart as soon as is practically possible, as it’s been proven time and time again that ransomware crews — Helldown, Black Basta, Akira, Medusa, and Scattered Spider, among them — love to exploit holes in VMware’s hypervisor.

Broadcom didn’t immediately respond to The Register‘s questions about the bugs, including how many customers have been compromised, who is exploiting these vulnerabilities, and for what purpose(s). 

We will update this story if and when we hear back, but until then all we know about the exploits is this line from the security advisory: “VMware by Broadcom has information to suggest that exploitation [of all three CVEs] has occurred in the wild.”

While it’s not Patch Tuesday, this does make March 4 a patch Tuesday. So good luck out there, VMware sysadmins. Happy patching. ®