Showing posts with label Cloud Security Risks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cloud Security Risks. Show all posts

Top 10 High-Risk Cloud & Virtualization Security Threats You Must Not Ignore

Top 10 High-Risk Cloud & Virtualization Security Threats You Must Not Ignore

As the wave of digital transformation irreversibly pushes core business operations to the cloud, the dynamic and elastic infrastructure composed of virtualization and container technologies has become the invisible backbone of modern society. However, this "cloud continent" carrying limitless possibilities is facing unprecedented, precise attacks on its foundation in 2025. Security boundaries are no longer just dotted lines outlined by network firewalls but extend deep into the instruction sets of every hypervisor, every system call of container runtimes, and even the speculative execution pipelines of CPU microarchitectures.


1. Kubernetes Ingress-NGINX Admission Controller Remote Code Execution Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-1974  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• ingress-nginx controller: versions ≤ 1.11.4, version = 1.12.0  


CVSS Score: 9.8  


Description and Impact: A template injection vulnerability exists in the ingress-nginx controller. When processing validation requests for Ingress objects, insufficient input validation and filtering (e.g., for the uid field) allow attackers to inject arbitrary directives into the NGINX configuration. An attacker within the cluster network (e.g., via cloud VPC or container escape) can send malicious requests to the default-enabled ValidatingAdmissionWebhook service, injecting directives such as ssl_engine to force NGINX to load malicious shared libraries.


2. VMware ESXi, Workstation VMCI Heap Overflow Vulnerability (TOCTOU)  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-22224  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• VMware ESXi 7.0 < ESXi70U3s-24585291  

• VMware ESXi 8.0 < ESXi80U3d-24585383, ESXi80U2d-24585300  

• VMware Workstation 17.x < 17.6.3  

• VMware Fusion 13.x < 13.6.3  

• VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5.x, 5.x  

• VMware Telco Cloud Platform 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x  


CVSS Score: 9.3  


Description and Impact: This is a Time-of-Check Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) vulnerability in the VMware Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI), leading to heap memory overflow and out-of-bounds write. Successful exploitation results in VM Escape, allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the host operating system, thereby threatening all virtual machines on the same host and the entire virtualization environment.


3. Docker Desktop Unauthorized Container Access / Container Escape Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-9074  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• Docker Desktop (Windows and macOS versions) < 4.44.3  


CVSS Score: 9.3  


Description and Impact: This is a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) / unauthorized access vulnerability. Due to a failure in container isolation mechanisms, processes inside a container can access the host's Docker Engine API without authentication. An attacker from within a compromised container can send requests to the API to directly create and start a new privileged container capable of mounting the host's disk, requiring only a few simple HTTP requests. This attack does not rely on mounting the Docker socket, and enabling Enhanced Container Isolation (ECI) does not defend against it.


4. Docker Compose Path Traversal Vulnerability Leading to Arbitrary File Overwrite  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-62725  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• Docker Compose all versions before v2.40.2 (excluding v2.40.2). Affected usage scenarios include: Docker Desktop, standalone Compose binaries, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud development environments.  


CVSS Score: 8.9  


Description and Impact: A critical path traversal design flaw. When parsing OCI Compose artifacts from remote repositories, Docker Compose unconditionally trusts embedded path annotations (e.g., com.docker.compose.extends).


5. VMware vCenter Server Post-Authentication Command Execution Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-41225  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• vCenter Server 7.0 < 7.0 U3v  

• vCenter Server 8.0 < 8.0 U3e  

• VMware Cloud Foundation (vCenter) 4.5.x and 5.x versions  

• VMware Telco Cloud series related versions  


CVSS Score: 8.8  


Description and Impact: This is an authenticated remote command execution vulnerability. After obtaining login access to vCenter Server and possessing special operation permissions such as "create or modify alerts" and "run scripts," an attacker can exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary commands on the vCenter Server operating system. Successful exploitation means the attacker can fully control the vCenter management server, potentially threatening all ESXi hosts and virtual machines managed by it, leading to data breaches, service disruptions, or using the server as a springboard for further attacks.


6. Helm Symlink Vulnerability Leading to Malicious Code Execution  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-53547  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• Helm: versions ≤ 3.18.3  


CVSS Score: 8.5  


Description and Impact: Helm is Kubernetes' package management tool. This is a symlink hijacking vulnerability. When executing the helm dependency update command, the program writes dependencies from Chart.yaml into the Chart.lock file but does not verify the file attributes of Chart.lock beforehand. An attacker can preset the Chart.lock file in the project as a symlink pointing to a user environment file (e.g., ~/.bashrc) and embed malicious commands in Chart.yaml. When the user updates dependencies, the malicious commands are written and contaminate the target environment file.


7. NVIDIA Container Toolkit Symlink Vulnerability Leading to Container Escape  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-23267  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• NVIDIA Container Toolkit: versions ≤ 1.17.7  

• NVIDIA GPU Operator: versions ≤ 25.3.0  


CVSS Score: 8.5  


Description and Impact: This is a symlink traversal vulnerability, categorized under CWE-59 "Improper Link Resolution Before File Access." The vulnerability is in the update-ldcache hook, which is used to update the cache after mounting GPU libraries inside a container. An attacker can create a container image containing malicious symlinks. When the container starts and executes this hook, the program follows these symlinks and writes to critical host files (e.g., /etc/ld.so.cache), achieving path traversal from inside the container to the host.


8. runc /dev/console Race Condition Container Escape Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-52565  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• v1.2.7 and earlier  

• v1.3.2 and earlier  

• v1.4.0-rc.2 and earlier  


CVSS Score: 8.4  


Description and Impact: runc has a path validation and race condition defect when bind-mounting the /dev/console device for a container, failing to adequately validate the target path. Through a malicious container image, an attacker can, at a specific moment during container startup, replace the container's /dev/pts/$n device with a symlink pointing to a sensitive file on the host (e.g., /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern). This results in the host's critical file being mounted into the container with write permissions.


9. VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-41244  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• VMware Tools: 11.x, 12.x, 13.x versions  

• VMware Aria Operations: 8.x, 5.x, 4.x, 3.x, 2.x versions  

• Related platforms: VMware Cloud Foundation (4.x, 5.x), VMware Telco Cloud Platform, and multiple other product lines  


CVSS Score: 7.8  


Description and Impact: VMware Tools' "Service Discovery" feature has a regular expression matching flaw. This flaw allows an attacker to place a malicious file with the same name as a critical system file in a writable directory (e.g., /tmp/), tricking VMware Tools into executing this malicious file with root privileges. A local attacker with low privileges on a virtual machine can use this vulnerability to escalate privileges to the highest administrator (root) level within the virtual machine.


10. VMSCAPE: Spectre-BTI-Based Virtual Machine Escape Vulnerability  

CVE ID: CVE-2025-40300  


Affected Products and Versions:  

• Affected CPUs: All AMD Zen 1 to Zen 5 architecture processors; Intel Coffee Lake and some earlier model processors.  


CVSS Score: 7.1  


Description and Impact: The first practical Spectre-BTI attack targeting unmodified, default-configured virtualization environments. It exploits isolation flaws in the branch predictor of modern CPUs (AMD Zen/Intel Coffee Lake) in virtualized scenarios, using a technique called Virtualized Branch Target Injection (vBTI) to corrupt the prediction state.

🔍 Why Cloud and Virtualization Risks Are Increasing

As enterprises accelerate cloud adoption and virtualization, attack surfaces grow rapidly.
Misconfigurations, unpatched platforms, and weak backup security make cloud and virtual environments prime targets for attackers.

Understanding the top high-risk cloud and virtualization threats is essential to maintaining business continuity and data protection.

🚨 Top Risk Categories Affecting Virtualized Environments

Most critical incidents fall into these categories:

  • Insecure hypervisor configurations

  • Weak access control and credential exposure

  • Unprotected backup infrastructure

  • Ransomware targeting virtual machines

  • Lack of immutability and offline backups

These risks impact VMware, Hyper-V, and cloud-based workloads alike.

🧠 Why Backup Infrastructure Is a High-Value Target

Modern attacks increasingly focus on backup systems, not production servers.
If backups are compromised, recovery becomes impossible—even if production systems are restored.

This makes secure backup architecture a core part of any cloud security strategy.

🔹 Backup & Ransomware Security

🔹 Recovery & Failure Impact



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