| V-63965 | High | The system must ensure the distributed port group MAC Address Change policy is set to reject. | If the virtual machine operating system changes the MAC address, it can send frames with an impersonated source MAC address at any time. This allows it to stage malicious attacks on the devices in... |
| V-63991 | High | The system must minimize access to the vCenter server. | After someone has logged in to the vCenter Server system, it becomes more difficult to prevent what they can do. In general, logging in to the vCenter Server system should be limited to very... |
| V-64009 | Medium | The system must use unique service accounts when applications connect to vCenter. | In order to not violate non-repudiation (i.e., deny the authenticity of who is connecting to vCenter), when applications need to connect to vCenter they should use unique service accounts. |
| V-63975 | Medium | All port groups must not be configured to VLAN 4095 unless Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT) is required. | When a port group is set to VLAN 4095, this activates VGT mode. In this mode, the vSwitch passes all network frames to the guest VM without modifying the VLAN tags, leaving it up to the guest to... |
| V-63149 | Medium | The system must prohibit password reuse for a minimum of five generations. | Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the effectiveness of a password in resisting attempts at guessing and brute-force attacks.
To meet password policy requirements, passwords need... |
| V-63967 | Medium | The system must ensure the distributed port group Promiscuous Mode policy is set to reject. | When promiscuous mode is enabled for a virtual switch all virtual machines connected to the Portgroup have the potential of reading all packets across that network, meaning only the virtual... |
| V-64011 | Medium | vSphere Client plugins must be verified. | The vCenter Server includes a vSphere Client extensibility framework, which provides the ability to extend the vSphere Client with menu selections or toolbar icons that provide access to vCenter... |
| V-64017 | Medium | Passwords must contain at least one uppercase character. | To enforce the use of complex passwords, minimum numbers of characters of different classes are mandated. The use of complex passwords reduces the ability of attackers to successfully obtain valid... |
| V-63951 | Medium | The system must manage excess capacity, bandwidth, or other redundancy to limit the effects of information-flooding types of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks by enabling Network I/O Control (NIOC). | DoS is a condition when a resource is not available for legitimate users. When this occurs, the organization either cannot accomplish its mission or must operate at degraded capacity.
Managing... |
| V-64015 | Medium | Passwords must be at least 15 characters in length. | The shorter the password, the lower the number of possible combinations that need to be tested before the password is compromised.
Password complexity, or strength, is a measure of the... |
| V-64035 | Medium | The system must alert administrators on permission update operations. | If personnel are not notified of permission events, they will not be aware of possible unsecure situations. |
| V-64019 | Medium | Passwords must contain at least one lowercase character. | To enforce the use of complex passwords, minimum numbers of characters of different classes are mandated. The use of complex passwords reduces the ability of attackers to successfully obtain valid... |
| V-64031 | Medium | The system must alert administrators on permission creation operations. | If personnel are not notified of permission events, they will not be aware of possible unsecure situations. |
| V-64037 | Medium | The vCenter Server users must have the correct roles assigned. | Users and service accounts must only be assigned privileges they require. Least Privilege requires that these privileges must only be assigned if needed, to reduce risk of confidentiality,... |
| V-64033 | Medium | The system must alert administrators on permission deletion operations. | If personnel are not notified of permission events, they will not be aware of possible unsecure situations. |
| V-63969 | Medium | The system must only send NetFlow traffic to authorized collectors. | The distributed virtual switch can export NetFlow information about traffic crossing the switch. NetFlow exports are not encrypted and can contain information about the virtual network making it... |
| V-63949 | Medium | The vCenter Server users must have the correct roles assigned. | Users and service accounts must only be assigned privileges they require. Least Privilege requires that these privileges must only be assigned if needed, to reduce risk of confidentiality,... |
| V-63945 | Medium | The system must enforce a 60-day maximum password lifetime restriction. | Any password, no matter how complex, can eventually be cracked. Therefore, passwords need to be changed at specific intervals.
One method of minimizing this risk is to use complex passwords and... |
| V-63947 | Medium | The system must terminate management sessions after 10 minutes of inactivity. | Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port... |
| V-63943 | Medium | The system must not automatically refresh client sessions. | Terminating an idle session within a short time period reduces the window of opportunity for unauthorized personnel to take control of a management session enabled on the console or console port... |
| V-63989 | Medium | Privilege re-assignment must be checked after the vCenter Server restarts. | Check for privilege reassignment when you restart vCenter Server. If the user or user group that is assigned the Administrator role on the root folder cannot be verified as a valid user or group... |
| V-63981 | Medium | The vCenter Server services must be ran using a service account instead of a built-in Windows account. | You can use the Microsoft Windows built-in system account or a domain user account to run vCenter Server. The Microsoft Windows built-in system account has more permissions and rights on the... |
| V-63983 | Medium | The system must ensure the vpxuser auto-password change meets policy. | By default, the vpxuser password will be automatically changed by vCenter every 30 days. Ensure this setting meets your policies; if not, configure to meet password aging policies.
Note: It is... |
| V-63985 | Medium | The system must ensure the vpxuser password meets length policy. | The vpxuser password default length is 32 characters. Ensure this setting meets site policies; if not, configure to meet password length policies. Longer passwords make brute-force password... |
| V-64005 | Medium | A least-privileges assignment must be used for the Update Manager database user. | Least-privileges mitigate attacks if the Update Manager database account is compromised. The VMware Update Manager requires certain privileges for the database user in order to install, and the... |
| V-64007 | Medium | A least-privileges assignment must be used for the vCenter Server database user. | Least-privileges mitigates attacks if the vCenter database account is compromised. vCenter requires very specific privileges on the database. Privileges normally required only for installation and... |
| V-64023 | Medium | Passwords must contain at least one special character. | To enforce the use of complex passwords, minimum numbers of characters of different classes are mandated. The use of complex passwords reduces the ability of attackers to successfully obtain valid... |
| V-64021 | Medium | Passwords must contain at least one numeric character. | To enforce the use of complex passwords, minimum numbers of characters of different classes are mandated. The use of complex passwords reduces the ability of attackers to successfully obtain valid... |
| V-64027 | Medium | The system must set the interval for counting failed login attempts to at least 15 minutes. | By limiting the number of failed login attempts, the risk of unauthorized access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account. |
| V-64029 | Medium | The system must require an administrator to unlock an account locked due to excessive login failures. | By limiting the number of failed login attempts, the risk of unauthorized access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account. |
| V-64025 | Medium | The system must limit the maximum number of failed login attempts to three. | By limiting the number of failed login attempts, the risk of unauthorized access via user password guessing, otherwise known as brute-forcing, is reduced. Limits are imposed by locking the account. |
| V-63979 | Medium | The system must enable SSL for Network File Copy (NFC). | NFC is the mechanism used to migrate or clone a VM between two ESXi hosts over the network. By default, NFC over SSL is enabled (i.e., "True") within a vSphere cluster but the value of the setting... |
| V-63973 | Medium | All port groups must be configured to a value other than that of the native VLAN. | ESXi does not use the concept of native VLAN. Frames with VLAN specified in the port group will have a tag, but frames with VLAN not specified in the port group are not tagged and therefore will... |
| V-63959 | Medium | The system must limit the use of the built-in SSO administrative account. | Use of the SSO administrator account should be limited as it is a shared account and individual accounts must be used wherever possible. |
| V-63955 | Medium | The system must use Active Directory authentication. | The application must ensure users are authenticated with an individual authenticator prior to using a group authenticator. Using Active Directory for authentication provides more robust account... |
| V-63977 | Medium | All port groups must not be configured to VLAN values reserved by upstream physical switches. | Certain physical switches reserve certain VLAN IDs for internal purposes and often disallow traffic configured to these values. For example, Cisco Catalyst switches typically reserve VLANs... |
| V-63999 | Medium | The vCenter Administrator role must be secured and assigned to specific users other than a Windows Administrator. | By default, vCenter Server grants full administrative rights to the local administrator's account, which can be accessed by domain administrators. Separation of duties dictates that full vCenter... |
| V-73137 | Medium | The system must protect the confidentiality and integrity of transmitted information by isolating IP-based storage traffic. | Virtual machines might share virtual switches and VLANs with the IP-based storage configurations. IP-based storage includes VSAN, iSCSI, and NFS. This configuration might expose IP-based storage... |
| V-63993 | Medium | Log files must be cleaned up after failed installations of the vCenter Server. | In certain cases, if the vCenter installation fails, a log file (with a name of the form “hs_err_pidXXXX”) is created that contains the database password in plain text. An attacker who breaks into... |
| V-63995 | Medium | The system must enable all tasks to be shown to Administrators in the Web Client. | By default not all tasks are shown in the web client to administrators and only that user's tasks will be shown. Enabling all tasks to be shown will allow the administrator to potentially see any... |
| V-63963 | Medium | The distributed port group Forged Transmits policy must be set to reject. | If the virtual machine operating system changes the MAC address, the operating system can send frames with an impersonated source MAC address at any time. This allows an operating system to stage... |
| V-64013 | Low | The system must produce audit records containing information to establish what type of events occurred. | Without establishing what types of events occurred, it would be difficult to establish, correlate, and investigate the events leading up to an outage or attack. |
| V-63961 | Low | The system must disable the distributed virtual switch health check. | Network Healthcheck is disabled by default. Once enabled, the healthcheck packets contain information on host#, vds#, port#, which an attacker would find useful. It is recommended that network... |
| V-73141 | Low | The connectivity between VSAN Health Check and public Hardware Compatibility List must be disabled or restricted by use of an external proxy server. | The VSAN Health Check is able to download the hardware compatibility list from VMware in order to check compliance against the underlying VSAN Cluster hosts. To ensure the vCenter server is not... |
| V-73143 | Low | The system must configure the VSAN Datastore name to a unique name. | VSAN Datastore name by default is "vsanDatastore". If more than one VSAN cluster is present in vCenter both datastores will have the same name by default potentially leading to confusion and... |
| V-63987 | Low | The system must disable the managed object browser at all times, when not required for the purpose of troubleshooting or maintenance of managed objects. | The managed object browser provides a way to explore the object model used by the vCenter to manage the vSphere environment; it enables configurations to be changed as well. This interface is used... |
| V-64003 | Low | The connectivity between Update Manager and public patch repositories must be restricted by use of a separate Update Manager Download Server. | The Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) is an optional module of the Update Manager. UMDS downloads upgrades for virtual appliances, patch metadata, patch binaries, and notifications that would... |
| V-63971 | Low | The system must not override port group settings at the port level on distributed switches. | Port-level configuration overrides are disabled by default. Once enabled, this allows for different security settings to be set from what is established at the Port-Group level. There are cases... |
| V-63953 | Low | The system must provide an immediate real-time alert to the SA and ISSO, at a minimum, of all audit failure events. | It is critical for the appropriate personnel to be aware if an ESXi host is at risk of failing to process audit logs as required. Without a real-time alert, security personnel may be unaware of an... |
| V-73139 | Low | The system must enable the VSAN Health Check. | VSAN Health Check is enabled by default in vSphere 6.0 update 1 and later, it has to be manually installed and enabled on vSphere 6.0.0 prior to usage. The VSAN Health Check is used for additional... |
