Special recognition to Lee Scites who collaborated on this article Introduction For the first time in Pwn2Own history, a researcher successfully compromised a VMware ESXi host, the very foundation of many enterprise virtualization environments. This occurred at Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, where Nguyen Hoang Thachof STARLabs SG leveraged a zero-day integer overflow vulnerability to execute code on the ESXi hypervisor from a guest VM. This isn’t just a competition milestone; it’s a wa
