CISA Issues Emergency Directive and Releases Advisory Related to VMware Vulnerabilities

Original release date: May 18, 2022

CISA has issued Emergency Directive (ED) 22-03 and released a Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) in response to active and expected exploitation of multiple vulnerabilities in the following VMware products: VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

The CSA, AA22-138B: Threat Actors Chaining Unpatched VMware Vulnerabilities for Full System Control, provides indicators of compromise and detection signatures from CISA as well as trusted third parties to assist administrators with detecting and responding to active exploitation of CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960.  Malicious cyber actors were able to reverse engineer the vendor updates to develop an exploit within 48 hours and quickly began exploiting these disclosed vulnerabilities in unpatched devices. Based on this activity, CISA expects malicious cyber actors to quickly develop a capability to exploit CVE-2022-22972 and CVE-2022-22973, which were disclosed by VMware on May 18, 2022. 

ED 22-03 directs all Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to enumerate all instances of affected VMware products and either deploy updates provided in VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2022-0014, released May 18, 2022, or remove those instances from agency networks.

CISA strongly encourages all organizations to deploy updates provided in VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2022-0014 or remove those instances from networks. CISA also encourages organizations with affected VMware products that are accessible from the internet to assume compromise and initiate threat hunting activities using the detection methods provided in the CSA. If potential compromise is detected, administrators should apply the incident response recommendations included in the CSA.

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