Broadcom Fails to Disclose Zero-Day Exploitation of VMware Vulnerability

A newly patched high-severity VMware vulnerability has been exploited as a zero-day since October 2024 for code execution with elevated privileges, NVISO Labs reports.

Tracked as CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score of 7.8), the security defect impacts both VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools.

VMware’s parent company Broadcom rolled out patches this week, warning that the flaw allows attackers to escalate their privileges to root on VMs that have VMware Tools installed and are managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled, but made no mention of its in-the-wild exploitation.

The company’s public advisories typically warn customers if zero-day exploitation has been detected. 

According to NVISO, which was credited for the find, a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor tracked as UNC5174 has been exploiting the bug for a year. UNC5174 was recently linked to an attack on cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.

“We can however not assess whether this exploit was part of ...