Oracle Virtualbox was identified and reported as having a critical vulnerability associated with Privilege Escalation and Arbitrary File Move/Delete.

This vulnerability was assigned with CVE-2024-21111, and the severity was 7.8 (High). 

However, Oracle has acted swiftly upon the report and has patched the vulnerability accordingly. Following that, Oracle also released a security advisory to address the vulnerability.

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Recently Oracle Releases Security Update in 2024 – 372 Vulnerabilities Are Fixed

Now, a publicly available exploit proof-of-concept has been published, providing detailed information on the vulnerability.

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PoC Exploit Released

This vulnerability existed in Oracle Virtualbox versions prior to 7.0.16, which allows a threat actor to escalate privileges to that of NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM via Symbolic Link, which will either perform an arbitrary file delete or an arbitrary file move.

This is because Oracle Virtualbox allows every user to write to the installation folder C:\ProgramData\VirtualBox.

Moreover, Virtualbox attempts to move log files from the location as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM for backup actions with a maximum of 10 logs. 

In addition to this, Virtualbox also tries to delete the 11th log on the location as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, which gives rise to these two bugs (File Delete and File Move) that can be utilized to attain privilege escalation.

As per the Proof-of-concept video shared for File Delete, the researcher uses a EXE file under the name “VBoxEoP_del.exe” which attempts to create a new log file (VBoxSDS.log.11) under the C:\ProgramData\Virtualbox directory and again attempts to delete the log file. 

This action combined together with an MSI file (Config.msi) provided the researcher with a new cmd terminal with the permissions of NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM.

The scenario is similar to Arbitrary file move also, in which the EXE file attempts to move the files from the C:\ProgramData\Virtualbox directory.

It is recommended that Virtualbox users upgrade to the latest versions to prevent threat actors from exploiting this vulnerability.

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