The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added nine more security flaws to its list of actively exploited bugs, including a VMware privilege escalation flaw and a Google Chrome zero-day that could be used for remote code execution.
The VMware vulnerability (CVE-2022-22960) was patched on April 6th, and it allows attackers to escalate privileges to root on vulnerable servers due to improper permissions in support scripts.
All Federal Civilian Executive Branch Agencies (FCEB) agencies must patch their systems against these security bugs after being added to CISA’s KEV list according to a November binding operational directive (BOD 22-01).
They were given three weeks to mitigate the flaws until May 6th to ensure that ongoing exploitation attempts would be blocked.
On Thursday, CISA also added the critical VMware remote code execution bug (CVE-2022-22954), now used in attacks to deploy cryptominer payloads.
All US orgs urged to prioritize these security updates
Even though the BOD 22-01 directive only applies to US FCEB agencies, CISA also strongly urges all US organizations from the private and public sectors to give patching these actively exploited bugs a higher priority.
Taking this advice to heart should significantly decrease the attack surface threat actors can use in attempts to breach their networks.
“These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise,” the US cybersecurity agency explains.
Since the BOD 22-01 binding directive was issued, CISA has added hundreds of flaws to its catalog of actively exploited bugs, ordering US federal agencies to patch them as soon as possible to block security breaches.
