Detecting CVE-2025-22224 with Falco

Falco, a cloud-native runtime security tool, plays a crucial role in detecting and alerting on suspicious activities such as VM and container escape attempts, particularly in light of vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-22224. This critical flaw in VMware ESXi hypervisors, identified by the Shadowserver group, allows attackers with administrative access to execute arbitrary code on the hypervisor, thus compromising all hosted VMs and networked assets. Although Broadcom has released patches to address this issue, the continued threat necessitates robust runtime threat detection. Falco excels at monitoring syscalls at the kernel level, generating real-time alerts for actions like privilege escalations or unauthorized access to host namespaces, although it does not block syscalls pre-execution. By leveraging eBPF for syscall visibility, Falco operates in detection mode, which, when combined with enforcement tools like SELinux and KubeArmor, enhances security measures to prevent exploitation. These tools provide additional layers of defense by enforcing strict access control policies and syscall restrictions, making them vital complements to Falco's detection capabilities for maintaining secure cloud environments.