VENOM vulnerability also known as QEMU exploit is the most recent vulnerability reported on May 13, 2015 and it is discovered by Jason Geffner while performing a security review of virtual machine hypervisors.

VENOM stands for “Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation”.

This venom exploits QEMU, an open source machine emulator. The venom CVE-2015-3456 vulnerability resides in the virtual floppy drive code (FDC) used by the virtualization platforms. If it gets exploited, it allows an attacker to gain full control of the operating system hosting them and as well as on the other guest VMs running on the same host machine.

 

Failure to mitigate this issue, this exploited virtual machine escape could open access to the host system and all other VMs running on that host, potentially giving elevated access to the host’s local network and adjacent systems running on the network.

Generally, to eliminate the possibility of exploitation, proceed with the following.

To install the updates using the yum package manager, execute the command given below.

yum update

To update the QEMU package and its dependencies alone, execute the command given below.

yum update qemu-kvm

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