VMware Workstation is among the targets of the PwnFest hacking competition. At this event, which is organized along the Power of Community security conference in Seoul, security researchers are demonstrating their attack capabilities. The event is modeled after the well-known Pwn2Own competition.

Earlier today at the event, the 360 Marvel Team and security researcher Lokihardt (JungHoon Lee) used the same issue to demonstrate that they could execute code on the VMware Workstation host from the guest. We have received details on this issue directly from the researchers and we are now working on a solution. We have confirmed that the issue is limited to VMware Workstation and VMware Fusion and that ESXi is not affected.

We would like to thank the organizers of the event, the 360 Marvel Team, and Lokihardt for working with us to address the issue.

November 13 update

Today, we’ve published VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2016-0019 which documents the release of VMware Workstation 12.5.2 and VMware Fusion 8.5.2. These new Workstation and Fusion versions address the issue that was demonstrated at the PwnFest event. The issue has been assigned CVE identifier CVE-2016-7461.