The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical security flaw affecting Broadcom VMware vCenter Server that was patched in June 2024 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild.
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-37079 (CVSS score: 9.8), which refers to a heap overflow in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol that could allow a bad actor with network access to vCenter Server to achieve remote code execution by sending a specially crafted network packet.
It was resolved by Broadcom in June 2024, along with CVE-2024-37080, another heap overflow in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol that could lead to remote code execution. Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin LegendSec researchers Hao Zheng and Zibo Li were credited with discovering and reporting the issues.
In a presentation at the Black Hat Asia security conference in April 2025, the researchers said the two flaws are part of a set of four vulnerabilities – three heap overflows and one privilege escalation – that were discovered in the DCE/RPC service. The two other flaws, CVE-2024-38812 and CVE-2024-38813, were patched by Broadcom in September 2024.
In particular, they found that one of the heap overflow vulnerabilities could be chained with the privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2024-38813) to achieve unauthorized remote root access and ultimately gain control over ESXi.
It’s currently not known how CVE-2024-37079 is being exploited, if it’s the work of any known threat actor or group, or the scale of such attacks. However, Broadcom has since updated its advisory to officially confirm in-the-wild abuse of the vulnerability.
“Broadcom has information to suggest that exploitation of CVE-2024-37079 has occurred in the wild,” the company said in its update.
In light of active exploitation, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are required to update to the latest version by February 13, 2026, for optimal protection.
