Critical VMWare ESXi Vulnerability

A newly identified integer-overflow vulnerability in VMware ESXi—tracked as CVE-2025-41236—is putting enterprise environments at significant risk, with over 17,000 vulnerable installations detected globally. This flaw resides in the ESXi HTTP management interface and carries a CVSS score of 9.3, indicating extreme severity. It enables unauthenticated remote code execution, privilege escalation, and potentially even ransomware deployment, all from outside the network perimeter.

Scans conducted by the Shadowserver Foundation (in collaboration with the UK Government) starting July 19, 2025, revealed 17,238 exposed IPs running affected systems. By August 10, that number had only marginally decreased to 16,330, showing that patch adoption remains critically low—less than a 5% improvement in three weeks.

The geographic distribution of vulnerable systems spans several countries—France, China, the U.S., and Germany among the most impacted—though exposure is also notable in regions like Russia, the Netherlands, and Brazil. Organizations face heightened risk not only because of the high severity of the vulnerability, but because many affected hosts are directly accessible from the internet, making them ripe targets for broad exploitation campaigns.

Urgent action is advised: administrators should immediately apply the available patches, restrict access to management interfaces, and leverage tools to assess whether their infrastructure remains exposed. With widespread exploitation potential and an extremely slow rate of remediation so far, the situation calls for rapid, prioritized response.

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