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CISA KEV · ACTIVELY EXPLOITED
HIGH severity

CVE-2025-41244 — open-vm-tools

HIGH

CVE-2025-41244 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) CWE-267 vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2025-10-30) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Published
Updated
Affected
8 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 2025-10-30. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2025-11-20.
  • 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-2025-41244.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
8.6%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk+0.19%
Lower risk than most CVEs95th percentile — riskier than 95% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%3.70%7.39%11.1%0.4%0.6%7.9%8.4%8.6%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

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

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2025-41244 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 Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a local privilege escalation vulnerability. A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM.

Affected Products

8 products · 10 configurations
OS
debian linuxdebian
1 version
11.0
Application
aria operationsvmware
≥ 8.0 && < 8.18.5
range
Application
cloud foundationvmware
≥ 4.0 && ≤ 5.2.2
range
Application
cloud foundation operationsvmware
1 version
9.0
Application
open vm toolsvmware
≥ 11.2.0 && < 12.5.4
1 version
13.0.0
Application
telco cloud infrastructurevmware
≥ 2.2 && ≤ 3.0
range

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. Fix

    Upgrade the affected component to the fixed release for CVE-2025-41244, or apply your distribution's backported patch — distro builds are often patched at an older version number, so check your vendor's advisory rather than the upstream version alone.

  3. Workarounds

    Close the privilege gap rather than the entry point: audit which accounts, roles and service identities can reach the affected operation, drop the component to the least privilege it actually needs, and review file and directory permissions created by earlier installs — a default left in place is what makes this reachable.

Fixing This On Your OS

If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.

Red HatImportant

This vulnerability was rated Important because, while it requires local code execution, the exploitation is trivial and leads to full compromise of privileged contexts such as root. The flaw lies in VMware’s service-discovery logic, which can execute attacker-controlled binaries from writable paths like /tmp. An…

Workaround published by Red Hat
There are two main ways to eliminate the risk of this vulnerability: 1) Temporary - Disable the guest service discovery features: Disable the servicediscovery plugin in the config or by running the command `vmware-toolbox-cmd config set servicediscovery disabled true` then restart the system. 2) More permanent - Uninstall `open-vm-tools-sdmp` then restart the system.
Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2025-41244 (CC BY 4.0)
ProductFixed inAdvisory
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10open-vm-tools-0:12.5.0-1.el10_0.1RHSA-2025:17429
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8open-vm-tools-0:12.3.5-2.el8_10.1RHSA-2025:17509
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Advanced Mission Critical Update Supportopen-vm-tools-0:11.2.0-2.el8_4.5RHSA-2025:17512
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 Advanced Mission Critical Update Supportopen-vm-tools-0:11.3.5-1.el8_6.6RHSA-2025:17511
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.8 Telecommunications Update Serviceopen-vm-tools-0:12.1.5-2.el8_8.5RHSA-2025:17510
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9open-vm-tools-0:12.5.0-1.el9_6.2RHSA-2025:17428
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 Update Services for SAP Solutionsopen-vm-tools-0:11.3.5-1.el9_0.6RHSA-2025:17452
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 Update Services for SAP Solutionsopen-vm-tools-0:12.1.5-1.el9_2.5RHSA-2025:17446

Frequently Asked Questions

VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a local privilege escalation vulnerability. A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM.
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CVE-2025-41244: open-vm-tools PrivEsc (High 7.8, KEV)