Background In mid-January, the Zero Day Initiative announced the rules for the 2017 version of the contest, including considerably high rewards for owning VMware and performing an escape from the guest to the host. VMware itself is not a new target, but was first included as a target in 2016. VMware as a target already suffered from various exploits in the past and has a reasonably large attack surface. Interestingly, a fair share of serious vulnerabilities that could be used for guest escapes was uncovered back in 2006-2009 and then again starting in roughly 2015 again with work by Kostya Kortchinsky and lokihardt targeting VMware’s virtual printing and drag-and-drop/copy-and-paste functionality.