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CISA KEV · ACTIVELY EXPLOITED
HIGH severity

CVE-2025-22225

HIGH

CVE-2025-22225 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.2) Out-of-bounds Write vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-03-04) and has been used in ransomware campaigns — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.

VMware ESXi contains an arbitrary write vulnerability. A malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process may trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox.

Published
Updated
Affected
4 products
Patched
See advisory
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Oct 23, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, CISA KEV, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

Actively exploited in the wild

  • Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2025-03-04 — including use in ransomware campaigns. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-03-25.
  • A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2025-22225.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
1.0%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs63th percentile — riskier than 63% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%4.23%8.46%12.7%7.9%1.0%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2025-22225 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Description

VMware ESXi contains an arbitrary write vulnerability. A malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process may trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox.

Affected Products

4 products · 55 configurations
Application
cloud foundationvmware
all
OS
esxivmware
2 versions
7.08.0
Application
telco cloud infrastructurevmware
4 versions
2.22.52.73.0
Application
telco cloud platformvmware
7 versions
2.02.52.73.04.04.0.15.0

Detection & mitigation playbook

Vulnerability

  1. Detect

    Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).

  2. Remediation status

    No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2025-22225 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.

  3. Mitigate without a patch

    Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable.

Frequently Asked Questions

VMware ESXi contains an arbitrary write vulnerability. A malicious actor with privileges within the VMX process may trigger an arbitrary kernel write leading to an escape of the sandbox.
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CVE-2025-22225: High 8.2 (KEV)