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Businesses have been urged to patch the two-year-old vulnerability amidst heightened ransomware threats. "The group has accelerated operations in recent months, focusing attacks on US-based healthcare organisations and specifically targeting Linux systems more recently.

Hundreds of organisations worldwide have been targeted by a hacking campaign exploiting VMware’s ESXi servers to deploy the new ESXiArgs ransomware variant.

 

French and Italian cyber security agencies issued an urgent warning last week after attackers were found to be actively targeting servers left unpatched against a two-year-old remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability.  

Tracked as CVE-2021-21974, the security flaw is caused by a heap overflow issue in the OpenSLP service and can enable an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code.  

VMware confirmed it is aware of exploit reports, adding that it issued a patch in February 2021 upon discovery of the vulnerability. However, the vendor urged customers to immediately apply the patch if the ESXi hypervisor has not yet been updated.