VMWare Security Blog

A step-by-step guide to calculating your security score, generating your first report, and turning it into a plan. Modern intrusions hit their target immediately after breaking in. These attacks are prevalent since up to 80% of data center traffic moves east-west, server to server, out of sight of a perimeter firewall. They land on one … Continued

The post Know Your Lateral Security Risk in an Afternoon: Getting Started with the vDefend Security Assessment appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

Securing the control plane that your Kubernetes strategy depends on. As enterprise containerization accelerates on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the vSphere Supervisor becomes the central focal point of both operation and platform risk. Securing tenant applications alone is insufficient – organizations must safeguard the infrastructure and control plane beneath them. VMware vDefend delivers a multi-layered, … Continued

The post Protecting the vSphere Kubernetes Control Plane: Architecting Zero Trust for Supervisor and VKS with vDefend appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

The global threat landscape shifted dramatically today following the disclosure of PHP2Shell, a pair of critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 (OOM memory corruption) and CVE-2026-109619 (stale global state). Both carry a CVSS score of 9.2 and affect core memory handling across decades of PHP releases. NOTE: VMware vDefend, VMware vDefend Security … Continued

The post Neutralizing PHP2Shell: Stopping Critical PHP RCEs with VMware vDefend and Avi WAF appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

While organizations continue to advance their zero trust lateral security initiatives, routine firewall operational and troubleshooting tasks frequently tie up limited IT resources – consuming time, introducing risk and hindering business agility. Additionally, modern security operations face significant challenges in analyzing and correlating complex security alerts, which often lead to visibility gaps, high false-positive rates, … Continued

The post Leveraging GenAI for Simplifying Zero Trust and Accelerating Threat Defense in VMware vDefend appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month is underway, and the rapid growth of generative AI makes robust defense strategies more critical than ever. Organizations must move beyond basic awareness to build practical, active defenses that protect their VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private clouds from increasingly sophisticated, AI-driven threats. To help you strengthen your security posture, VMware is excited … Continued

The post Mastering Cybersecurity with VMware vDefend and Avi via Hands-on Labs appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

The enterprise technology landscape is undergoing a radical transformation, and at its core is the modern data center. Virtual machines (VMs) and agile Kubernetes-based environments have long served as the foundation of this infrastructure. However, as companies deploy artificial intelligence in daily business operations, they must aggressively expand their AI ecosystems to handle highly resource-intensive … Continued

The post VMware vDefend IDPS: Securing Private Cloud Workloads in the Age of Frontier AI appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

New enhancements include a prescriptive workflow to accelerate Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) deployment, an on-premises Malware Prevention System, comprehensive air-gapped support, an AI Assistant for firewall operations, major performance gains for the Distributed Firewall and Intrusion Detection and Prevention Service (IDPS), and automated migration tooling. Earlier in May, VMware vDefend delivered Self-Service Lateral Security for … Continued

The post VMware vDefend Advances Multi-Layer Lateral Security, Deployment Automation and Performance for the Frontier AI Era appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

Ready to learn how to secure your private cloud workloads against a new wave of AI-driven threats while accelerating your Private Cloud and App modernization journey? VMware Explore returns to the Venetian Convention and Expo Center in Las Vegas from August 31 – Sep. 03, 2026. Step into the next generation of enterprise infrastructure and … Continued

The post VMware vDefend Sessions at VMware Explore 2026 appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

VMware vDefend directly conforms to NIST CSF, HIPAA, and PCI DSS requirements, providing organizations with the critical controls needed to satisfy regulatory mandates and mitigate modern threats. Regulatory compliance has become a strategic imperative across all industry sectors due to a growing global focus on data privacy, supply chain transparency, and operational resilience. This urgency … Continued

The post Validated Compliance: VMware vDefend Conforms with NIST CSF, HIPAA and PCI DSS appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

In the past, data center security mostly relied on perimeter protection—”building walls” to keep bad actors out. Today, safeguarding the data center’s “east-west” or lateral traffic traversing within applications and data is just as critical. Threat actors are leveraging “Frontier AI” security models to automate and accelerate attacks against private cloud workloads.  To help enterprises … Continued

The post Introducing VMware vDefend Lateral Security Design Blueprints for VCF 9.1 appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

We would like to bring your attention to a security bulletin from AMD: AMD-SN-2001: Ionic Driver Vulnerabilities. The bulletin details three vulnerabilities — CVE-2025-62623, CVE-2025-62624, and CVE-2025-62627 — present in the AMD ionic cloud driver for VMware ESX. These issues affect ESX hosts using AMD-Pensando DPU (Data Processing Unit) products. We strongly encourage you to … Continued

The post AMD Ionic Driver Vulnerabilities Affecting VMware ESX appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

Update, July 29, 2026 Today, Broadcom has released the following new VMware security advisory: VMSA-2026-0006 – VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation, and Fusion updates address multiple vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-59309, CVE-2026-59310, CVE-2026-47876, CVE-2026-41703, CVE-2026-41709) The advisory documents the remediation of the Critical severity vulnerability (VMXNET3 out-of-bounds write vulnerability- CVE-2026-47876) demonstrated at the Pwn2Own 2026 hacking contest. Customers should review … Continued

The post VMware at Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

New enhancements include Self-Service Lateral Security with VCF Automation, Unified Lateral Threat Prevention for VMs and VKS Workloads, High-Performance Threat Prevention with IDPS Turbo Mode, and Enhanced Distributed Firewall capabilities. The rapid adoption of production AI workloads is reshaping the enterprise technology landscape, driving the growth of Kubernetes environments alongside existing VM-based infrastructure. As organizations … Continued

The post VMware vDefend for VCF 9.1: Zero Trust Lateral Security for the AI Era appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

This article was originally published December 2025 in:     Hugely disruptive ransomware attacks can be thwarted by distributed lateral security embedded at the private cloud level, using macro- and micro-segmentation and integrated threat detection and prevention. Ransomware attacks in 2025 have caused business operations to close for weeks and months resulting in massive financial … Continued

The post Breaking the Ransomware Kill Chain: Why Distributed Lateral Security Is No Longer Optional appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

As the digital landscape enters the age of Artificial Intelligence, the traditional methods of securing applications are being fundamentally challenged. The emergence of advanced AI models has shifted the advantage towards attackers. With AI, even a novice attacker is now weaponized into a sophisticated hacker while operating semi-autonomously at very low cost, and unprecedented scale. … Continued

The post Virtual Patching: Guarding Against a Tsunami of AI-discovered Exploits with vDefend and Avi appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

In a cloud-native environment, Kubernetes-based containerized orchestration has brought developer agility – but it has also fundamentally changed the security paradigm. Traditional “castle-and-moat” security designs that rely on a perimeter firewall are no longer enough to protect modern workloads. Once an attacker breaches that outer shell, the flat network architecture common in many Kubernetes environments … Continued

The post VMware vDefend: Zero Trust Lateral Security for Kubernetes Workloads on VCF appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

In September 2025, the cybercriminal group Storm-1175 exploited a zero-day vulnerability in GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer to deploy Medusa ransomware across multiple organizations. The attack succeeded despite perimeter defenses because no signature existed to detect it, and by the time one did, attackers had already established persistence and were moving freely through victim networks. This … Continued

The post Why Perimeter Firewall is Not Enough: Lessons from the GoAnywhere MFT Zero-Day appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

The “Invisible Corridor” Security doesn’t break all at once; it erodes in the shadows. The alert didn’t appear to be a crisis because, to your perimeter, everything looked normal. An authorized user, a permitted port, and a standard protocol—on paper was a valid connection. In reality, it was the “keys to the kingdom” being handed … Continued

The post Advancing Zero Trust Private Cloud with vDefend Lateral Security appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

This article was originally published May 2025 in: AI can transform Zero Trust security implementation and management from a complex manual and multi-year task into an highly-automated, rapidly-deployable solution for modern enterprises. As enterprises increasingly move workloads to private cloud for reasons such as performance, compliance and to leverage AI on-premise, security leaders face a … Continued

The post Game changer: How AI simplifies implementation of Zero Trust security objectives appeared first on VMware Security Blog.

When deploying Zero Trust to quickly address security gaps and improve segmentation posture in a brownfield or greenfield environment, customers need a prescriptive, multi-stage segmentation workflow designed to progressively secure east-west traffic in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud. vDefend delivers Distributed Firewall (DFW) 1-2-3-4* — an automated workflow that helps security administrators systematically … Continued

The post vDefend DFW 1-2-3-4: Deploy Zero Trust Microsegmentation in a Few Weeks to Rapidly Secure VCF Workloads appeared first on VMware Security Blog.