On Tuesday, August 23, an advisory notification was released by VMware, the virtualization technology software firm, announcing a local privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2022-31676). Updates are available to remediate this vulnerability in affected VMware products.
This security vulnerability could be exploited by threat actors with local non-administrative access to the Guest OS and can be used to escalate privileges as a root user through a virtual machine commonly, referred to as a "VM".
This impacts most versions of "VMware Tools" running in both Windows and Linux. This is an important security vulnerability and should be patched within your next patching cycle.
SCOPE
This impacts customers with virtualized on-premises computing environments for the following VMware versions.
| PRODUCT | VERSION | RUNNING | CVE ID |
| VMware Tools | 12.x.y,11.x.y & 10.x.y | Windows | CVE-2022-31676 |
| VMware Tools | 12.x.y, 11.x.y | Linux | CVE-2022-31676 |
| VMware Tools | 10.x.y | Linux | CVE-2022-31676 |
Non-VMware environments and those customers who have no on-premises or physical server hardware, cloud-only, are not impacted.
COURSE OF ACTION
If your IT staff manages your VMware environment, they can retrieve the required patches from VMware here.
Systems Engineering customers impacted by this vulnerability and subscribe to IT Essentials or Network Administration services, we are presently working through the plan to deploy the patch in the coming weeks.
For customers who have questions about this security alert, please reach out to your Account Manager.
