VMware ESXi Active Directory Integration Authentication Bypass
CVE-2024-37085 is an authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware ESXi affecting hosts that are joined to Active Directory for user management. On vulnerable domain-joined ESXi systems, membership in a specially named AD group is treated as sufficient for full ESXi administrative access without proper validation. The issue is described as involving the ESXi behavior of automatically granting administrator privileges to members of the configured AD management group, commonly referenced in reporting as "ESX Admins" and in some Broadcom materials as "ESXi Admins." An attacker with sufficient permissions in Active Directory can exploit the flaw by creating, recreating, or renaming a domain group to the expected name and adding a controlled account to that group. ESXi then grants that account full administrative privileges on the host. Reporting also indicates stale elevated access may persist until an ESXi privileges refresh is performed.
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Impact, mitigation & remediation
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Impact
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
Mitigation
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Remediation
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Exploits
No valid public exploits. Mallory filtered out 1 candidate as fakes, detection scripts, or README-only repos.
All candidate exploits were filtered out by Mallory's validation.
Affected products & vendors
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Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
Recent activity
40 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A VMware ESXi / Active Directory authentication weakness that can grant full ESXi administrative rights to members of a specially named AD group, enabling rapid hypervisor compromise.
A named VMware ESXi Active Directory integration authentication bypass vulnerability referenced as an associated analytic story, without further detail in the content.
An authentication bypass vulnerability affecting VMware ESXi Active Directory integration that can allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to ESXi hosts by recreating the "ESX Admins" group in Active Directory.
An authentication bypass vulnerability affecting VMware ESXi Active Directory integration, where creation, deletion, or modification of the "ESX Admins" group in Active Directory may indicate exploitation activity.
The version that knows your environment.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.