Vulnerability Management

VMware discloses important local privilege escalation bug found in 3 products

VMware's latest security advisory discloses three vulnerabilities spread out among five products. The most significant of this trio is an "important" time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) flaw in the service opener of Fusion, VMRC and Horizon Client that can be locally exploited to escalate privileges to root.

Officially designated CVE-2020-3957, the bug was assigned a CVSSv3 base score of 7.3, and has so far been fixed in version 11.5.5 of Fusion. Patches for VMRC and Horizon Client are still forthcoming, however.

Vmware has also issued fixes for a denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2020-3958) in the shader functionality of ESXi, Workstation and Fusion and a memory leak vulnerability (CVE-2020-3959) in the VMCI module of ESXi, Workstation and Fusion.

Bradley Barth

As director of multimedia content strategy at CyberRisk Alliance, Bradley Barth develops content for online conferences, webcasts, podcasts video/multimedia projects — often serving as moderator or host. For nearly six years, he wrote and reported for SC Media as deputy editor and, before that, senior reporter. He was previously a program executive with the tech-focused PR firm Voxus. Past journalistic experience includes stints as business editor at Executive Technology, a staff writer at New York Sportscene and a freelance journalist covering travel and entertainment. In his spare time, Bradley also writes screenplays.

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