Local Privilege Escalation in VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools Service Discovery
CVE-2025-41244 is a local privilege escalation vulnerability affecting VMware Aria Operations, VMware Tools, and open-vm-tools in Linux guest virtual machines. The issue is exposed when a VM has VMware Tools installed, is managed by VMware Aria Operations, and the Service Discovery Management Pack (SDMP) feature is enabled. Technical reporting in the provided content indicates the flaw is in the service discovery/version collection logic, including the get-versions.sh script in open-vm-tools, which uses overly broad regular-expression matching to identify service binaries and then executes matched binaries with version arguments in a privileged context. Because the matching can include attacker-controlled paths such as writable locations under /tmp, a local unprivileged user can place and run a malicious binary with a listening socket so that VMware service discovery later identifies and executes it as root or another privileged service account. The weakness is best characterized as an untrusted search path issue.
Are you exposed to this one?
Mallory correlates every CVE against your assets, your vendors, and active adversary campaigns. Know which vulnerabilities matter for you, not just which ones are loud.
Impact, mitigation & remediation
What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
Impact
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
Mitigation
If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.
Remediation
Patch, then assume compromise.
Exploits
No valid public exploits. Mallory filtered out 2 candidates as fakes, detection scripts, or README-only repos.
All candidate exploits were filtered out by Mallory's validation.
Affected products & vendors
Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
Recent activity
146 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
A critical privilege escalation vulnerability affecting VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools, reported as exploited for an extended period.
A high-severity vulnerability affecting VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools that CISA has tagged as actively exploited.
A high-severity vulnerability affecting VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools, reported as exploited in zero-day attacks attributed to Chinese hackers.
A high-severity vulnerability in VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools that was exploited as a zero-day by Chinese hackers.
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.