On June 7, 2023 VMWare released an advisory for CVE-2023-20887, a command injection vulnerability in VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Cloud Mangememt) with a critical severity score (CVSS) of 9.8. The proof of concept for this exploit was released June 13th, 2023 by SinSinology. 

Primary takeaway is:

“VMWare Aria Operations Networks is vulnerable to command injection when accepting user input through the Apache Thrift RPC interface. This vulnerability allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system as the root user.” – SinSinology


This issue can be resolved by updating to the latest version. Further information can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2023-0012.html

At the time of writing we have observed attempted mass-scanning activity utilizing the Proof-Of-Concept code mentioned above in an attempt to launch a reverse shell which connects back to an attacker controlled server in order to receive further commands. Continual monitoring of activity related to this vulnerability can be tracked via the relevant GreyNoise tag below.

Example HTTP POST request containing code to exploit the described vulnerability

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This article is a summary of the full, in-depth version on the GreyNoise Labs blog.
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