Trump Greenlights Bitcoin, as VMware Patches Zero-Day Exploits

In early March 2025, a significant event took place when the White House authorized the US government to explore strategies for actively purchasing Bitcoin. This move was led by White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar David Sacks, who highlighted that the executive order signed by Trump could pave the way for the US to actively buy Bitcoin. The order detailed two key components - a strategic reserve solely containing Bitcoin, using around 200,000 seized tokens for criminal and civil forfeiture, and a digital asset stockpile including other cryptocurrencies using already owned seized assets. This decision caused a drop in the price of Bitcoin amid the news.

Around the same time, another crucial development occurred in the tech world as VMware addressed three actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in its ESX products. Broadcom released security updates to tackle these vulnerabilities - CVE-2025-22224, CVE-2025-22225, and CVE-2025-22226 - which were actively being exploited in the wild. These vulnerabilities affected various VMware ESX products and could allow an attacker with privileged access to escape the virtual machine's sandbox. The flaws ranged from a VMCI heap-overflow vulnerability to an arbitrary write issue and an HGFS information-disclosure vulnerability.

The first vulnerability, CVE-2025-22224, presented a TOCTOU issue in VMware ESXi and Workstation, potentially leading to an out-of-bounds write. On the other hand, CVE-2025-22225 was an arbitrary write problem in VMware ESXi that could be triggered by attackers with privileges within the VMX process. Lastly, CVE-2025-22226 was an information disclosure vulnerability affecting VMware ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion, allowing attackers to leak memory from the VMX process. These vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers from the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center.

Following the discovery and subsequent patching of these vulnerabilities, VMware confirmed that exploitation of the flaws had occurred in real-world scenarios. The company emphasized the critical nature of the security issues and highlighted the potential for threat actors to access the hypervisor through a running virtual machine. While specific details about the attacks and the threat actors behind them were not disclosed, the acknowledgment of exploitation in the wild underscored the urgency of addressing these zero-day vulnerabilities to protect users of VMware ESX products.

Links to the stories discussed: - Trump Authorizes US Government To Explore Strategies for Actively Purchasing Bitcoin - VMware fixed three actively exploited zero-days in ESX products