The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has flagged a critical VMware vCenter Server vulnerability as actively exploited and ordered federal agencies to secure their servers within three weeks.

Patched in June 2024, this security flaw (CVE-2024–37079) stems from a heap overflow weakness in the DCERPC protocol implementation of vCenter Server (a Broadcom VMware vSphere management platform that helps admins manage ESXi hosts and virtual machines).

Threat actors with network access to vCenter Server may exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted network packet that can trigger remote code execution in low-complexity attacks that don’t require privileges on the targeted systems or user interaction.