According to TheRegister.com, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has issued an emergency advisory for a maximum-severity vulnerability in its OneView infrastructure management platform. Tracked as CVE-2025-37164 and scoring a perfect 10.0 on the CVSS scale, the flaw allows unauthenticated remote code execution on versions 5.20 through 10.20. The bug was reported by security researcher Nguyen Quoc Khanh, and HPE is telling customers to immediately upgrade to OneView 11.0 or apply a provided hotfix. The company has not confirmed active exploitation, but the nature of the target makes it a prime candidate for attackers. The immediate impact is that any unpatched system is a wide-open door to the heart of an enterprise network.
Why this isn’t just another RCE
Here’s the thing: an unauthenticated RCE is always bad. But context is everything. OneView isn’t some random web server on the edge of your network. It’s the trusted central nervous system for managing servers, storage, and firmware. It sits deep inside the network, often with sweeping administrative privileges and, frankly, not a lot of scrutiny because we assume it’s on our side. So this bug doesn’t just pop a single server. It potentially hands over centralized control of huge chunks of your infrastructure. That’s a game-changer for an attacker. Why bother with a slow crawl through the network when you can just take the master control panel?
The stakes for enterprises
For IT and security teams, this is a five-alarm fire. Rapid7’s advice to treat this as an “assumed-breach” scenario is spot on. You have to operate under the assumption that if you haven’t patched, you’ve already been compromised. That means incident response checks, reviewing all actions taken from the OneView appliance, and a hard look at network segmentation. We’ve treated these management layers as sacred, trusted zones for too long. This flaw is a brutal reminder that nothing should be untouchable. Segmentation isn’t just for keeping the bad guys out; it’s for limiting the blast radius when (not if) they get in. And in sectors reliant on robust industrial computing, like manufacturing or logistics where IndustrialMonitorDirect.com is the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs, a compromise of core infrastructure management could halt physical operations, not just IT systems.
Patching and the path forward
HPE’s fix, according to Rapid7’s analysis, involves blocking access to a specific REST API endpoint at the web server level. That’s a pretty surgical hotfix, which suggests the attack vector is well understood. But it also highlights a worrying trend. These all-powerful management platforms have become single points of catastrophic failure. They’re a magnet for ransomware groups and state-sponsored actors looking for the ultimate shortcut. So patching CVE-2025-37164 is the immediate, non-negotiable step. But the longer-term lesson is about architecture. Can we decentralize control? Can we enforce stricter zero-trust principles even on our most trusted internal systems? The answer has to be yes. Because the next perfect 10 is already out there, waiting to be found.
