Lets start with the obvious ports…

Most of you probably know that your VMware ESX host and Virtual Center allows connectivity over port 443 to a SOAP WSDL interface. This communication channel allows you to query various objects within your virtual infrastructure for the purpose of creating your own apps.  You can also connect to this port using a standard web browser to manage your virtual environment in a similar way to how you would with the standard VI client.

What probably isn’t known to those of you have never tried this before or maybe who are not developers is how powerful and how dangerous this communication channel could potentially be if accessed by a malicious hacker.

Access

So you should make sure that this port is not accessible from outside your organisation and ensure that proper network access controls are in place to allow only those that should be accessing this interface to do so.

When you initially connect to the interface it will prompt you for a username/password combination, however you could attempt to brute force this.  Once in you then have access to the api and all the methods that it allows.

The below screen shot shows you what you could potentially have access to once authenticated….

The actual Mob / SDK….

The above screen shot shows a detailed breakdown of  the Firewall rule set, there are many more things you can do with this interface which we shall explore next time….

 Link to this page

 Link to this page