Critical VMware Workstation and Fusion Flaw Lets VM Admins Execute Host Code

Broadcom has released security updates for two security flaws impacting VMware Workstation and Fusion, including one critical bug that could result in arbitrary code execution under certain conditions.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-59346 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an integer-overflow vulnerability that a local attacker with elevated privileges can exploit to run arbitrary code.

"A malicious actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine with VMXNET3 virtual network adapter may exploit this issue to execute code on the host," Broadcom said in an alert.

The tech giant credited @h4urek, @cameudis, and Stan S for discovering the issue.

Also patched by Broadcom is a stack-based buffer-overflow vulnerability in HGFS (CVE-2026-59347, CVSS score: 8.1), which can be exploited by a bad actor with local administrative privileges on a virtual machine to execute code as the virtual machine's VMX process running on the host.

Yeonghyeon Choi and Tianchu Chen of Tencent Xuanwu Lab have been acknowledged for reporting the flaw.

In both cases, successful exploitation hinges on an attacker already possessing local administrative privileges, although it's worth noting that they can be obtained through a separate compromise through phishing or exploiting weak user configurations.

The two vulnerabilities affect VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion versions 25H2 and 26H1. Broadcom said there are no workarounds that address the two vulnerabilities, adding that they have been patched in VMware Workstation 26H1u1 and VMware Fusion 26H1u1.

Although there is no evidence that the security flaws have been exploited in the wild, vulnerabilities in VMware products have been an attack magnet.

As recently as last month, threat actors were observed actively exploiting two shortcomings in VMware vCenter, namely CVE-2026-59309 and CVE-2026-59310, with the latter suspected to be weaponized by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor.

The activity, which started five calendar days after public disclosure of the flaw, is estimated to have breached 361 unique victim IP addresses across 47 countries. Most of the infections were concentrated in Germany (55), the U.S. (41), Turkey (38), Iran (26), and France (25).