And who exactly is Elias Taylor to be qualified to make these absolute statements without evidence, so that they end up with 200 comments on #2 on the HN front page?
An empty blog by a person that may or may not exist with no contact info.
It is not a swipe to say that people seem to be switching off their critical thinking here in favor of a lie that is comfortable, when the truth has been _very_ uncomfortable.
Yeah mentioning that a lot of nonsense has been happening with LLMs is the truth anchor that untruthful writing uses to pass through people's firewalls.
Not too dissimilar to anti-vaxx stuff or that whole other space of these kinds of dysfunctions.
You always need some kind of hook that is correct.
The question remains: is vanilla PHP with its default configuration easily exploitable? What are the prerequisites, and what configuration deviations are required compared to default config in the anime girl video?
I think I’ve identified every device on my internal networking running php, but I’d love a reliable poc I could poc that I could run before someone starts lateral movements.
If it’s easy to exploit then it should be easy to find a POC
A human being, presumably. But he could be a dog or a diffusion model and I wouldn't care, because arguments stand on their own. There is no special caste of people who alone have permission to propose ideas.
You advocate critical thinking. Excellent. Can you critically evaluate "Elias Taylor"'s argument?
Which, if true, would at least be kinda funny and would hit institutions that deserve it for having failed to hire trustworthy people that aren't susceptible to that.
So that's a silver lining I guess.
Whoever gets pwned due to this might get naturally out-selected. The system works!!11 Thank you darwin.
If Satan himself proves a theorem, is it nevertheless a true theorem? Claims are either true or they are false. There is no such thing as an evil truth. Where are the breaches?
But don't you understand? The aim wasn't to prevent the breaches that would inevitably happen on day one; it was to prevent the breaches that would happen after that fact. Without mobilising everyone and getting people to patch through an event, we'd be in a far worse position.
The greatest trick that Devil performed was convincing people that he didn't exist, right?
Are they, though? I seriously doubt some sysadmin is going to look at this and say "Maintainers said to patch, but clearly _this guy_ knows better, so I won't."
Besides, he's got a point. The initial PoC that kept popping up on Mastodon (the ones he linked in the post as well) simply didn't work. One of them even posted an updated exploit later that still didn't work, but supposedly meant the vulnerability went from CVSS 10 to CVSS 4.
Please keep in mind that Brandolini's law exists, and so does a whole arsenal of stuff like the Gish Gallop.
Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and here, the extraordinary comes from that blogpost's claim, as the developers saying "yes the software we made is actually broken" is not extraordinary.
Not to take away from the GP's claims but where in that whois does it say 3 days old? The page has two posts, one is "We are all doomed" and the other is "AI is bad at what it supposedly does", first post created (according to the site itself) just after the domain was registered 20 days ago.
Two things can be true: it's a real, exploitable CVE 10, and it's hard enough to construct that you need a good harness + verification process to keep your LLM from cheating. So, the exploit may not be easy to construct, but it doesn't actually require the artificial settings that the OP implied.
> What we demonstrated
> Pre-authentication RCE on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla
This is such a strange claim from someone trying to sound knowledgable in the field of cyber security (maybe they are, I have no idea who this person is). Even if the exploit would be difficult to use properly, it's not like there's a lack of groups out there trying.
Anyone serious about this would consider the fact that a working PoC was reported to the PHP security team. They confirmed the vulnerability and started making a lot of noise about the severity of it, by reporting 2 CVEs and pushing the patch to Linux distros ahead of the official patch release.
Trying to understand what the message of the post is all about, I flipped the whole thing around in my head - and the message is basically "you don't need to upgrade your servers". Which is something someone with a working exploit would say. Or it's just noise on the Internet.
Social media and "cybersecurity experts" had a big role in this. Stuff like "EU SAYS THIS IS A URGENT VULNERABILITY" and even the Prime Minister of Japan doing a nighttime PSA. They cite "the experts" posts on social media about the initial advisory, while the very same so-called experts share google search AI output mitigation strategies. None of these organizations or bodies had any details other than what was on the advisories and social media. (e.g "CVSS 10, that's bad!!")
To me, it seems more more akin to broadpwn, technically severe, wide scope (millions of iphones), yet will never be a one-size-fits-all-PWN-button.
Even in the age of AI, I don't think this is going to be weaponized down the line like how Eternalblue was... but I'm not the social media cybersec guy with 15000 followers, so don't take my words at face value ;)
I feel like half of working in the cybersecurity industry is just cultivating your social media persona. It's bizarre. I left a viral up-and-coming startup over it. It was mixing into everyone's personas at work in weird and uncomfortable ways, as someone who doesn't use traditional social media.
There are a few “social media famous” cybersecurity folks really worth their salt who didn’t immediately dumpster their morals and skills at the first sign of an ego boost.
People like Krebs, Allison Nixon, Joanna Rutkowska.
Most of them though are just addicted to likes as it’s become a core part of their self worth.
Most cybersecurity is performative, like war, cybersecurity is mostly boring and if you are doing your job, zero drama. If you want to stand out you need piercings and hot takes.
The pop culture makes you think cybersecurity is wearing black clothes, having wild tatoos and jacking-in the matrix with a dripped up thinkpad while at the back of a nightclub. Turns out, its wearing suit, and showing slide to corporate begging them to have a review process for their firewall and a decommission plan for their 20 years old services made in java 6 and never updated.
I would argue that Krebs is exactly the type of guy who will do anything for a good story, whatever it costs. I saw him lying more than once and this eroded my trust completely.
I actually rather like 'SOCMED', given that social networks these days can be weaponized in various ways, so it deserves a name akin to 'OPSEC' and other military-like terms
you'll find egomaniacs in any industry. From experience the people who actually speak regularly at cybersecurity conferences do tend to have a "cult of personality" aura about them. Part of it is industry incentives too. If you have a bunch of stuff on Github / technical blog posts / social media presence it helps a lot finding a job. So I wouldn't necessarily entirely blame them for cultivating a social media persona.
It’s not. Social media personas is most of what gets seen, hence your understandable conclusion. What most don’t see are those who do not give a damn about that and just do the work.
So I have been failing to do half of my career this whole time?
The people you hear from are famous personalities... That's the nature of being a famous personality. There are plenty of us who are just normal people with opinions of our own and no desire to cultivate a public name or face for ourselves...
People seem to not understand that cybercriminals are lazy, as well. They're not gonna sink a lot of effort into doing something technically impressive when there are way easier ways to generate a decent ROI. Why would they mess around with remote heap grooming when there are plenty of nday rce in widely-deployed enterprise slop just laying around, makes no sense.
For me, what was strange is there were no write-ups on how the vulnerability actually worked. It really does feel like a lot of people went "Claude found a bug, and Claude says it's dangerous" but no one actually verified how exploitable it actually is? Not to say its worth ignoring, but compared to Heartbleed (where exploits had to be written by hand) there are a lot fewer active PoCs.
There are multiple write-ups on how the vulnerability works. The Calif one is the most detailed. Also, no one used Claude. There's a whole world of information out there when you read the original sources instead of social media distortions.
> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet initiative, with Wiz also independently discovering and reporting both vulnerabilities
> Using Gemini 4 Argon, the team at Wiz has shown why frontier AI is a game-changer for cyber defense. For over a decade, these critical vulnerabilities remained unaddressed because vulnerability discovery and exploitation were incredibly complex.
- Raluca Ada Popa, Head of Gemini Security, Google DeepMind
They even did try Claude Mythos earlier in the year, and it didn't find this. There's a reason "no-one used Claude" for this now.
"Earlier this year, we worked with Alpha-Omega to scan PHP with Anthropic's Claude Mythos. But since the Mythos scan, we have added other tools, including OpenAI's Daybreak Red for validating reports and exploits, alongside sanitizer builds and reproduction environments that match our CI on every platform PHP supports."
Interestingly enough there are papers that suggest that AI feeding on itself will degrade output quality over time. What I've noticed from my peers is that everything produced now looks the same, and they're sick of it.
I do tend to disclose my use of AI, but at the same time I don't feel like I'm required to. I'm doing it to signal that my use of AI was productive, and of value to people beyond myself.
that's the point: it essentially shows (notice the --profile-flag) the work of 2 months making the exploit work reliably on every app-php/fpm-linux-combination. The only purpose is to spread fear - and then have 50% of the internet update to a patched version with 425 changed files reviewed by ~100people and their clankers at 1400 UTC sharp while for the vast majority (using fpm like recommended for ~10years everywhere...) disabling the progress-something-flag and (optionally...) disabling multipart-uploads would have nicely mitigated this.
The video looks like it's making this whole thing out to be a joke. Everything about it conveys a lack of seriousness. The dancing cartoon character, the ascii art, the music, the whiz-bang visual effects that obscure anything interesting or useful.
Agreed. The only main post was somebody on jackly something .com who overdosed on the matrix and communication skills of a squirrel picking random tokens from a dozen trees.
I'm actually curious if a lot of shit got hacked because so far it doesn't seem so. Though it seems like it should have? We always see these catastrophic vulnerabilities showing up but when are the ones where it is actually just widespread publicly dumping databases everywhere and at a point where someone non technical even registers it.
I'm sure there is more to it than generally "ask Claude". I asked Claude this as a joke and it downgraded all the way to Sonnet before it would answer, and I was previously approved for their dual use cyber program.
The latest POC video for the php2shell exploit features a dancing anime girl. How would you create a video like this?
I'm not saying the 'Claude says this is bad so therefore it's bad' is at the heart of this PHP vuln, but I'm also seeing the same phenomenon in workplace settings with 'meatproxy'-behavior of so much AI use that tends to overfit and hyperfocus on narrow issues, that then punts the work to other people in ways that just waste time (whereby pre-AI, humans would simply not have the capacity to investigate minuscule issues so they'd never be reported as such). But these days, it's just hardcore meatproxy and reverse centaur vibes all over the place (people just acting as the face of AI, and creating so much work that the other people can't really keep up with any of it anymore), and I wouldn't be surprised if that's happening to some extent in infosec more broadly too. (not saying the vulns and exploits aren't real - but there's definitely a long tail of them now where only a few are deserving of a lot of attention, patching, mitigations etc).
The writeups showed up after 14UTC, after the embargo. All of those clowns sharing non working PoCs didn't actually know the bug, they only contributed to the general hysteria
I ran 2 PoCs from GitHub today: one indeed expected Local File Inclusion (LFI) to already be present (so it's just LFI with extra steps), and the other one didn't work at all out of the box without some modifications (although I used the same Docker images and all). The second PoC did trigger a real stale write bug in the end, but it didn't demonstrate actual RCE; it just triggered a stale write. And then I wondered, is this the first time ever that the PHP runtime has had a memory corruption bug? I doubt it (I remember a few years ago we had random crashes in production under high load due to an opcache bug). And if it's not the first memory corruption bug in the PHP runtime, why is it being proclaimed the worst vulnerability in years?
There is an argument to be made that taking down such a sizable chunk of the Internet automatically qualifies it as a pretty severe vulnerability, even if no actual exploits were involved in causing it.
More seriously, though, I read it as bad because of the potential. All versions of PHP going back a full two decades were affected, all users of PHP are affected regardless of which features they use, and it’s still unclear if there’s an effective mitigation. So the blast radius if anyone does/did have a working exploit would have been enormous.
We do need to eventually see the proof that this was so urgent. Because if it wasn't then this was effectively a massive DOS attack on society.
"9.2" is a big claim and a powerful justification for action, but with OpenAI involved my faith is very low that this isn't largely a publicity stunt. Especially given the age of the vulnerability.
You've got under 5 minutes to decide whether or not a widely reported critical security vulnerability actively being exploited in the while is severe enough to warrant taking down your site or not. The downside for taking down your site is approximately 0, and the upside is that you don't get shrekd
No security expert can or should work that fast. Its a completely reasonable thing to do given the hyperbolic reporting just in case it turns out to be true. Some websites being down for a few hours doesn't end the world
Agreed. This is all lazy chair hindsight talk, maybe by those not affected by it. In the moment you act on the imperfect information you have available and you use the safe than sorry rule. And to demand perfect information is also a fallacy, it doesn’t exist until after the fact.
I'm in charge of my employer's ecommerce website. To me there's a critical difference in severity between a RCE vulnerability and being to takedown/crash a website.
I mean Patch the Planet. This was the first I had heard of it, and I assumed from seeing the press releases from OAI working their way through journalism’s digestive tract that it was announced today - but perhaps it was previously announced.
If that is case, I’ll refine my statement to “Also happening today: OpenAI is doing a PR push on their software vulnerability initiative”, which I think suffices to convey the same meaning as the original.
Revealing that before people have had time to update, or it is already being exploited widely just increases the risk that more attacks will happen. I'd be sceptical if we don't get info eventually, but for now, things being vague is expected.
Yeah, I also got a POC working against a live serve.
The author of the article made a critical mistake in gaining my trust. He said the POC's don't work and told me to run it.
--Which-- POC's, Charlie? Why aren't you giving a full listof what you tried. This isn't reddit, and you're not doxxing or attacking anyone. Post the links. Give sources or shut up.
* Regarding one CVE, "Remote code execution was also confirmed on PHP-FPM through application-level code paths."
* Regarding the other CVE, "A use-after-free and worker crash were confirmed, and the reporter demonstrated remote code execution against a real-world application running on Apache with mod_php."
Since those exploits exist, I expect that LLMs will duplicate them soon.
That said, OP is basically full of shit. This is absolutely exploitable and people are going to just assume the platform and ABI and spray it against the internet, particularly hoping for mod_php.
Yeah, I don't think I've touched mod_php ever since Apache 2.4 came up with mod_proxy_fcgi, allowing dead simple integration with php-fpm.
PHP does need to invest more in the built-in web server, though. Last time I checked, they still recommend against using it in production.
All other popular runtimes provide a standards-compliant HTTP daemon that any other HTTP daemon can proxy to, it's just the way things work nowadays. Insisting on FastCGI limits integration with more modern web servers and HTTP-speaking middleware.
I have the feeling that for some time now the CVE scores are insane. A while back we have a security issue with a dependency in Java that had a score of 9 I believe. It had a requirement that the attacker had root access.
If they're so confident this isn't exploitable this person should stand up a very basic nginx running php-fpm server running in an exploitable version of PHP and invite people to exploit it.
I totally agree. We can sit here and posture all day, maybe it might justify our paychecks. Exploit it and show me why it’s fucked. Otherwise it’s just words
There seems to be a group of actors, both in this thread and the one about the PHP release, that try to convince readers that patching existing PHP installations is not that critical.
I think this group has a good reason for not wanting PHP installations to get patched.
On the other hand, my local qwen model (3.8-flash-next) was trying to convince me that the eMudhra CA thing is no big deal since you need to be "positioned correctly" (eg: any wifi network) to be able to MITM, and most of the IOT devices would have patched stuff by now.
The CA thing is bad, but in practice a lot more high effort to exploit. As a prerequisite the attacker has to be present on the same network, which makes any individual attack a lot more high effort. In contrast for something like PHP2Shell (if exploitable) any PHP instance exposed on the internet can be attacked by anyone from anywhere.
With a MITM, you also mainly breach confidentiality, but this doesn't directly give you an exploit chain to pwn the device (though the many auto-updaters people are using nowadays might be one).
For IOT devices, there are also factors that limit the exposure. The certs are only from 2025/2026, so few devices with them installed are likely present in any given home, and depending on the hardware footprint devices may only come with the few select CAs bundled that they require due to size constraints anyways.
The difference is that PHP has a long history of vulnerabilities while platforms like Java don't. And as bad as Log4Shell was, it wasn't a problem with the core runtime. It wasn't even a problem with the most popular logging framework at the time.
My employer at the time didn’t use log4j, but we were still plenty vulnerable. All sorts of open source packages we used had a transitive dependency on it.
Very few opensource packages actually used log4j directly. Libraries generally use some sort of shim like commons-logging or slf4j so they can log into whatever your application chooses as a long sink.
Merely declaring a transitive dependency didn't mean that the code was executing nor did it mean that user input was actually being logged through those libraries.
Log4j v2 (the vulnerable version) just wasn't that common at the time. Most everyone had moved on to Logback, and Log4j v1 (not vulnerable) was still more popular than v2.
Was it actually though? I worked at an MSP at the time and our tools were just flagging the mere existence of the library. It either wasn't being used or wasn't exposed in any meaningful way. Oh a dev happens to have it installed on his laptop? Who cares.
It's a weird move for this post to simultaneously line this vulnerability up against Log4Shell (very few serversides are going to measure up to L4S) and insinuate that it's not practically exploitable at all.
If it was just "everyone take a breath, we've been through something worse with Log4Shell", that would make a lot more sense.
Core run time vulnerabilities in PHP, the language and runtime itself, are rare. I remember the days when an exploit in the JVM was a daily announcement. To the point where they had to ban java applets from the web.
> Core run time vulnerabilities in PHP, the language and runtime itself, are rare.
They may be rare today but they have historically been very common.
> To the point where they had to ban java applets from the web.
Those are not RCEs, they were sandbox violations. Sandboxing untrusted code is hard and really only javascript engines have pulled it off. Java and Dotnet gave up, and that's fine.
PHP's security failures are not from trying something ambitious. They're from generating web content on a server. These are not comparable.
Did they learn not to fix overflows by checking a variable for "> PHP_INT_MAX"?
That patch was hilarious. But you might have to meet Perl greybeards to understand the fun the internet made of the PHP core devs after that.
> The difference is that PHP has a long history of vulnerabilities while platforms like Java don't.
What makes you say that? I know several websites that ran on unpatched PHP 5 versions for over a decade, without a care in the world until now, because there were no known serious vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself.
I think PHP is fine as long as you use a maintained framework, at least in my experience. I've used SlimPHP and Yii2 in the past and never had any security issues. I've worked on a few PHP sites that rolled their own frameworks which in retrospect was pretty iffy. One of them got yearly pen tests and there were never any issues found but the other two probably had some latent issues.
In my Slim PHP application container, the only way I could reproduce the PHP2SHELL behavior was by adding `index.php` and `upload.php` from the attached gist to the webroot.
As others have said, there are probably other ways to reproduce it, but it requires a lot of prior knowledge of the app environment, or at least a good guess.
Anime girl level cataclysmic security events definitely don't worry me as much as laughing man (笑い男) cataclysmic events; only then it's when I really start to panic.
the awful edit featuring an underage anime girl only exposes the childish, immature behavior of the people handling this situation, which makes this even more terrifying!
Shigure Ui is an illustrator and vtuber. She has a teenage character which is her main character. She also has a young girl character (age 9) which is the one that was put into the exploit explanation video.
Hi, I am the CEO of Trail of Bits (https://www.trailofbits.com). We've had two of our staff independently write working exploits for this flaw. The first one took about 4 hours, start to finish. The second was a similar amount of time spread over the course of a day. We've tested our exploits to work on an unmodified MediaWiki.
tl;dr writing exploits still requires expertise, even when you're being aided by an LLM
I am also curious, but I do want to butt in to disagree with the point you're implying.
We've had red team exercises against our systems multiple times, and the victory always goes to someone who exploits not one thing in isolation, but a sequence of multiple they go around prodding for. It doesn't matter if this exploit goes 0 to 100%, as long as it works half way, I still want to hear of it.
Parts of the exploit chain that was laid out in the blog posts that claim an RCE were bugs that have previously been reported. Dealing with them in the past in the severity you outline would have possibly prevented the exploit chain.
However, it's specifically the ability to complete this to an RCE what makes or breaks the headlines here.
I've seen many posts like this. None of them stood the test of time. Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.
It's also not easy to pop an iPhone, but reliable, weaponized exploits are available in trade and governments use them in a plug-and-play way.
The specific controversy here is about the disclosure timeline. Some people allege that the disclosure and patch release of this vulnerability were mishandled; others dispute this. The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period. Nobody is arguing that the vulnerability doesn't need to be patched at all. (The PHP core team didn't initially treat it with much urgency, but they've acknowledged that this was a mistake.)
> The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period.
I sure hope thats not true.
All signs indicate that writing a self-replicating exploit that'd flood the internet without warning is possible. All we know is that nobody did.
A lot of websites - especially the ones who made the call to go down first like government / healthcare - do not have the luxury of taking any risk.
Writing this blog post with the "hindsight" of no exploit going viral for several hours after the patches is - let me be frank - complete bullshit; and i dont want this person anywhere near an important system.
If by next _year_ nobody has proven a successful consistent hack, then we can start to doubt the videos. If there is, then all of this has been warranted.
I think it's entirely possible that the released exploit and the early released video are independent of each other. The video contains a couple of hints and stack traces, so someone could've used that to pinpoint the problem and write an exploit of their own (or, based on the website it appeared on, had an LLM generate one).
On the other hand, Chainguard did release their patches before the agreed upon time, proving they can't be trusted if you're working on coordinated patch releases. That was an absolute mess.
Time is the whole point though. Everyone was terrified and shutting their websites down because they believed the exploit would be running wild on the internet in between it hitting git and them being able to update the server.
If it takes a week to come up with a working exploit code, the critical services have time to update.
Time is part of the point, but it is not the whole point. The whole point involves the fact that this impacts two decades worth of PHP versions. Even if it took months to exploit, there is going to be a long, long tail of breaches against ill-maintained legacy sites.
Huh, I thought we were talking about this because it's a massive security breach offering approximately unconditional RCE against half of the servers on the open web.
The specific reason for the current degree of consternation, to the point where many websites went down preemptively which didn't happen even with Log4Shell, is that for about half a day there were multiple alleged proofs-of-concept circulating on Twitter while the PHP Foundation refused to release the patch. If that hadn't been the case, we'd still be having a conversation, but a different one.
Suppose hypothetically there was no disclosure period at all. Suppose that at the time the PHP team made the announcement that there was an unmitigable unconditional RCE against ~every version of PHP with advice to take servers offline, they had just been made aware of it themselves, and simply did not have a patch ready yet. The pre-emptive taking of servers offline until a patch was available, the OP blog post that was written, and this comment thread would all still apply the same. Nothing in this thread was in any way related to the embargo period. It is extremely weird that you came into a thread irrelevant to the embargo and told me my comment was irrelevant to the embargo, and then have stuck to your guns arguing this incessantly. The embargo and the severe vulnerability are related. They are not the same thing, and much of the conversation would in fact be exactly the same regardless of the embargo.
There's no need for an embargo before the patch is available, because the core team can just not tell anyone. It's only once there is a patch that the decision has to be made whether to embargo it.
You can never rule out the possibility that someone interested in attacking you has a non-public exploit, but it's dramatically less likely if there aren't already working exploits circulating all over the internet.
I don't think that's very true. Certainly, modern LLMs make it much easier to discover a vulnerability given only limited clues—but if it's easy to find that way, then probably someone will do that and post it for clout. So if no one has, then it probably isn't.
That "if" is load bearing and increasingly flat-out false.
Crowdstrike's average "breakout times", the time gap between a first successful infiltration and maximal exploitation, has gone from days or hours prior to 2024 to minutes or seconds now.
Time is not the whole point. How are people in this thread this clueless?
Risk is the whole point. The websites going down first were government / healthcare.
Do you expect these websites to take the risk? Risks that you now feel is justified because hindsight seemed to have collapsed the possibility-space?
We can talk about this again next year; if still nobody has demonstrated a working consistent attack that _could_ have pwnd my gov and medical records, then we can reflect on the severity score and the response.
ease is somewhat relevant initially, since it determines how quickly you have to patch before exploits start popping up. I would be extremely curious to see if anyone has been pwned by this already, especially before the public release of the patches (not that I doubt it, but I heard some people saying they saw attempts in their logs, but not really enough information to tell whether they were understanding their logs correctly. The situation just seems a bit murky and unclear to me).
> Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.
Not if your LLM relies on existing code and you collectively create a million repos with hallucinated broken implementations that do not work before a good public exploit exists, which later LLMs rely on. LLMs are self-defeating that way.
The only other post on this blog is "Anything connected to the internet is going to get hacked to pieces." I'm not claiming any contradiction but it is funny.
Okay finally some sense. I felt like I was going insane seeing the freakout over this. From people who would care but a fraction if there weren't some AI angle.
I think this is way overthinking it. It's PHP. Even 2, 3 years ago before usable LLMs, if somebody had told me there is a remote execution vulnerability in php I would have found it completely plausible.
The certificates incident was mitigated by the fact it was revoked within hours so by the time people found out, it was resolved.
Yes there is a long tail of Internet of Shit devices that have a fixed non updated cert store, but these devices are being absolutely ripped to shreds by AI from all angles already.
It's not just IoT devices. It's also a very very long tail of programs which for some reason have their own copy of the CA certificates list, either because they don't trust the system's one, want to work identically on all platforms, have a severe case of not-invented-here, or all three at the same time (looking at you, Java...)
Most non-browser TLS clients (so basically everything else, with default settings), things like curl, Python, Node, Go, Java, git, package managers and every script and daemon you've got, do three things that matter here: they trust a CA bundle on disk, they don't check revocation by default, and they don't check CT. So the fact that eMudhra and Sectigo have revoked these intermediates doesn't help them at all. [1]
Couldn't this be enforced at the router? Intercept outbound TLS. If the client hello is to a new domain, hold it and start a new outbound connection and see if the server responds with a certificate on the CRL. If so, ban it. Otherwise let the original TLS connection proceed.
The certificate incident requires a working MitM of TLS traffic. That isn't easy to pull off and browsers will immediately warn you the second they see someone try that.
The PHP exploit, as presented, runs directly from attacker to server. There's no requirement for an attacker to already be in the network.
Wiz: "These vulnerabilities include memory disclosure and unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP itself, independent of the application running on top of it"[1]
Calif: "the available exploitation paths depend on the PHP version and SAPI but are always exploitable under default configurations" ... "This results in RCE against arbitrary PHP scripts on Apache mod_php and PHP >= 5.4.0."[2]
PHP Foundation: "full remote code execution was demonstrated with default settings."[3]
Unless all of these organizations are lying, the exploit can work against a default PHP installation running a Hello World script.
At least with the PHP one they caveat this with "under the right conditions" which judging by what we know now, the right conditions are you've already exploited the server with a LFI
The author isn't disputing that these organizations have developed working exploits, they're saying that the exploit is difficult enough to achieve that, as far as they can tell, nobody has publicly released a working exploit except for vibe coders whose exploits rely on insane misconfigurations on the server.
With previous showstopper security bugs, once you knew the vulnerability existed the exploit was immediately obvious.
What kind of pisses me off was that there were kind of two sides of the continuum.
You've got the detailed technical writeup on one end in the patches themselves, and on the other end you've essentially got the AI and security companies both together (php2shell) and independently with their highly polished microsites and blog posts with attractive infographics and stylized pitch deck looking images.
Every publication on the other side of the detailed technical writeup in the patches themselves wanted to make it into a huge fucking marketing stunt first and foremost, providing absolutely zero added practical benefit or value.
I have had this take but for things like exploiting with a DRAM interposer ala Battering RAM. They say it's a low cost attack, but the amount of obstacles you need to overcome (including having root on the system and physical access) is intractable to virtually everyone, and a nation state wouldn't go to that kind of gymnastics when it is more than likely there is a quicker and easier way in.
But this? I doubt any high value targets will be exploited in the wild since news travelled fast and from what I can see pretty much most took preventative action. Looks like pretty much everyone heeded the warning and suggestions. It'll mostly be a nothing burger like Heartbleed. There'll be of course low hanging fruit of unpatched servers out there, but anything of importance would have already had active maintenance and patching.
Now that Calif has released the details, I'm sure there'll be a contingent that can actively and easily exploit this, either now or very soon, with or without the guidance of LLMs.
But yeah if someone said Battering RAM, I would say fuggedabout it, but if someone said PHP vulnerability with a CVE of 9.2, I would say patch it ASAP or bring the servers down until you can.
> but anything of importance would have already had active maintenance and patching
Mostly because people either "did it" or yelled long enough and loud enough that it "got done". There is a saying about horses and water, but some people needed to be dragged, kicking and screaming and have their faces shoved in the well.
When headlines like "there wasn't an easy exploit" come out I have burned a lot of good will, on what people will perceive as "nothing burger". The security space has a knack for making a complete mockery of itself and then wondering why no one seems to give a fuck.
"I'm getting too old for this shit" really does apply to today.
> It's been 10 hours since this vulnerability has been posted, and half the software world is looking at it, and lord knows 100,000 people have got their "superintelligence" on the case.
This is the most compelling argument presented. If this PHP vulnerability were actually so bad, we'd be probably be seeing some kind of widespread impact by now. If every potential target requires a second coincidental, target-specific vulnerability I think we should probably call off the search party.
The alternative way to describe this situation is "defense in depth". We've located a very thick part of the ship hull that we could technically drill through if we had enough time and money to do so, but this would not scale up in any meaningful way. What you can do to a vessel in dry dock vs on the open seas are two wildly different universes. Vulnerabilities located under pristine lab conditions or within the context window of a clanker do not bring me much concern.
Many apps (eg chrome) frequently fix bugs that are actively exploited in the wild yet have no public weaponized chain (sometimes for months).
The fact that there is no fully public weaponized chain does not mean it does not exist or that this bug is not as scary. It only means that it is not as trivial to exploit as log4shell/shellshock/etc.
According to cloudflare [1], it is being exploited in the wild.
It's like y2k. Yeah, there isn't much of a problem currently. We're patching before it becomes a problem. That's not Bot Who Cried Wolf*, that's responsible security. You don't have to wait for a YouTube tutorial on how to do it before it's something to urgently patch.
*My phone autocorrected to that and I'm keeping it.
>> There's something important to be said here about how many people have Claude/GPT make design decisions for them, and how AI is the primary decision maker in the world right now.
It was some good drama, and honestly I didn't even know LLM was involved so heavily in it. But damn annoying that people blindly believed LLMs and I blindly believed those people.
The biggest problem is that for a good 12 hours nobody knew what was going on. All we knew was there is a critical vulnerability affecting all of us that allows RCE somehow and we have to have vulnerable servers open for potentially even longer.
Everyone who knew was being hush hush, only chiming in to say "nah, those workarounds don't work, you're fucked".
So when people started spreading rumors of PoC or when the Cloud flare CTO posted that they were actively seeing exploit traffic - what are we supposed to do?
We aren't sitting there trying to PoC with Claude - we're subscribing to a bunch of news feeds and twitter accounts while we try to prepare for the patch and close down what we can. We're calling executives saying "hey, how much money do we lose by being offline for 6 hours?"
So even if this isn't as easily exploitable as first believed, no one could have known that, because those with the ability to calm us down were seemingly choosing to stoke the fires.
This is (IMO) a failure of the potentially outdated disclosure system that's supposed to protect us. And at the very least a trial run of how the world may react next time, if it really is that bad.
Yeah, I suggested to take down the app someone between seeing the Gina (core) comment (saying php.ini etc changes won't do anything) and after seeing the Cloudflare CTO tweet.
Very well said. Even for non-sensitive stuff that I was told was "super vulnerable", I didn't know if this was a full, actual RCE - some places said yes, others no. Did I need to take down everything running PHP? Just the apps dealing with data I didn't want leaked? Etc.
The rather long delay in getting official Docker images didn't help; we were told "patch now!!1!!" but that apparently meant building from source.
Great reply, this hits the nail in the head and is pretty much exactly how I spent my day. Just reading, waiting and stressing while being essentially in the dark about the whole thing.
I'm assuming the next few days will probably confirm if this was mostly FUD or not.
IMO it is a little bit silly to describe “a system that works well until it intersects with a trillion dollar company’s PR campaign” as an outdated failure.
Or perhaps, trillion dollar companies should be more responsible. Either because they fear regulation that will force them to be responsible, or because there is regulation that will make the responsible.
I agree. At present I do not see any set of incentives, meta-incentives, etc., that are extant, or even rigorously imaginable[0], that will lead to such a state of affairs.
0: credit to Xenosystems for this excellent phrase
RCE is incredibly dangerous not because it lets you execute arbitrary code, but because it lets you execute some code. Code you're not supposed to execute. As soon as someone can do that, all they have to do is probe until they find something to chain.
Almost every system on the internet has some local code you can chain to gain root, or a way to put some in place. It gets worse when it affects legacy systems, because they're the bastard stepchild of security. RCE on a box that hasn't been patched since Obama's first term is what little blackhats' dreams are made of. And developers are way too lazy to intentionally design their apps into different privilege domains to protect against chaining. Unless your app runs chroot() (is my neckbeard showing?) or in a container with nothing but a Go binary, somebody can LFI it.
A crack in the door is plenty of space to get a crowbar in (especially with interpreted languages).
I just like to imagine the japanese PM being woken up in the middle of the night with an assistant holding a laptop, they open it and they watch the anime girl dancing around with that techno song in the background and start panicking.
> When I think about "we're very fucked" CVE10s on the Internet, I think of the following vulnerabilities:
Which is IMHO a really good list. It's also, I think, important to note that every single one of the four items is not at all a memory safety bug. They're all logic, at various levels of an interpretation stack.
I think a lot of folks with their heads down in the security world might have expected the opposite. As is often the case in engineering, the smartest people end up obsessing over solving the less important parts of the problem.
Serverside memory corruption is annoying to get working. As a dominant metagame strategy for attackers, it's much more impactful on the clientside.
(I'm not cosigning the analysis in this blog post. I think "I haven't seen a PoC I could get working" is not the evidence this author seems to think it is.)
I think Heartbleed is close enough to memory safety to count. It was caused by memory allocator returning uninitialized memory and every memory safe language I know about does not allow this in best-practice code.
(And sure, there are escape hatches - like Python has "recv_into" that could be used to implement heartbleed if you are really inclined to - but this would not be a realistic python program. In python, even with buffer reuse, you'd be using memoryview or similar that can't have a heartbleed problem)
The vast majority of web services are not written in memory unsafe languages so this is not surprising.
One of the exceptions (with regards to web facing attack surface in a memory unsafe language) is that people still use OpenSSL, which has a terrible history of memory unsafety, including the cited heartbleed.
If anything, claiming that this vulnerability has been known and unpatched for 22 years supports the author's point: clearly it's not that easy to actually use.
Do you have any links to a working PoC that appeared before the details were released? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting info, and I'm not really sure what to think. People saying they were seeing people trying to exploit this hours ahead of the patch release on their servers, yet no one who seemingly actually got pwned by it (were people just misreading their logs?)
Glad to be proven wrong but as far as I can see there are no reports of it currently being exploited in the wild at the scale you are implying. It genuinely takes a lot of time to weaponize even with the assistance of frontier LLM models and it is way more difficult when you don't control the server.
I largely agree with the author and it is a common annoyance in cyber security discussions where people make strong claims but have nothing to back it up with.
I am so annoyed… I am trying to verify the claims of this article with my friend Claude but daddy Dario won’t let me because “cyber”. I pointed it at this article and a PoC [1] I found on DuckDuckGo. We live in a stupid world. I can’t run it right now so I am trying to figure out if it’s serious.
OP seems to be implying that there's no way the UAF bug could be used to run arbitrary code with higher privileges than PHP itself, on a vanilla installation. I couldn't divine that from reading the CVE. Is that true...? Is that why you'd need PHP to exec an existing file or something? Or is that assumption just based on the fact that the PoCs so far rely on nerfing PHP? If the latter, it's a bit ironic to complain about everyone's judgment skewing toward Claude's while using Claude-generated code not doing it as circumstantial evidence that such a thing can't be done.
I'm no expert on UAF exploits. I guess one thing I'm wondering is whether the pointer to "freed" memory in this case is still pointing to memory reserved by the system for a PHP process, or if it's some address that's truly free and could be picked up by another process.
> or if it's some address that's truly free and could be picked up by another process
This isn’t a thing; virtual memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory) is very old, and Linux has never not used it. It takes a separate vulnerability (a “local privilege escalation”) to do what you’re getting at. (However, those are plentiful, and arbitrary malicious code with PHP process privileges is often already catastrophic for a web service.)
That said,
> OP seems to be implying that there's no way the UAF bug could be used to run arbitrary code with higher privileges than PHP itself
Thanks for the explanation. Maybe I don't totally understand.
And yeah, obviously it's still dangerous to have arbitrary code running with PHP's privileges.
Just one thing: With mod_php, those httpd processes are spun up on demand. After that the memory is released to the system, right? There's no master Apache webserver process holding all those addresses.
Just for clarity, I took the OP's point to be that the only way this could be used to escalate privileges would be if there were existing scripts on the server with credentials that PHP itself could be made to exec() ...but... if you know a process is going to be spun down and no longer holds a pointer to the memory you're writing to, couldn't you theoretically write something that might be picked up by the next process? Or is that always formatted by the next process' vm?
Appreciate your patience, I'm not a low level coder.
It’d be redundant for me to write up the whole explanation here, but the short version is that every process has its own memory space, provided in a clean state by the OS, that other processes can’t read from or write to, regardless of pointer values. The same pointer value in two processes doesn’t refer to the same memory unless there’s specific coordination. Keywords you can use to read more about the long version on previous Wikipedia link.
> Or is that always formatted by the next process' vm?
And who exactly is Elias Taylor to be qualified to make these absolute statements without evidence, so that they end up with 200 comments on #2 on the HN front page?
An empty blog by a person that may or may not exist with no contact info.
It is not a swipe to say that people seem to be switching off their critical thinking here in favor of a lie that is comfortable, when the truth has been _very_ uncomfortable.
Yes, but the same is true about LLM output. Guess there's actually no way around this than to go look yourself.
Yeah mentioning that a lot of nonsense has been happening with LLMs is the truth anchor that untruthful writing uses to pass through people's firewalls.
Not too dissimilar to anti-vaxx stuff or that whole other space of these kinds of dysfunctions.
You always need some kind of hook that is correct.
The question remains: is vanilla PHP with its default configuration easily exploitable? What are the prerequisites, and what configuration deviations are required compared to default config in the anime girl video?
If core developers say "this is actually bad", don't bargain if a patch is needed. Patch it.
There is no higher authority on "this is actually fucked" other than the people that actually make that very sausage.
Patching it is painful. It needs to be done regardless.
Yes, we should all patch like every other bug - but its the CVSS score and the panic which is in question.
CVSS scores are a bad measure anyway
I think I’ve identified every device on my internal networking running php, but I’d love a reliable poc I could poc that I could run before someone starts lateral movements.
If it’s easy to exploit then it should be easy to find a POC
At least it wasn't the lighthouse keeper Elias Thorne.
Should be easy enough to verify the central claim that you need to be able to read the password file through some other means to use this exploit.
> And who exactly is Elias Taylor
A human being, presumably. But he could be a dog or a diffusion model and I wouldn't care, because arguments stand on their own. There is no special caste of people who alone have permission to propose ideas.
You advocate critical thinking. Excellent. Can you critically evaluate "Elias Taylor"'s argument?
For all we know, Elias Taylor has been fabricated in order to remove the sense of urgency from as many sysadmins and devops as possible.
Which, if true, would at least be kinda funny and would hit institutions that deserve it for having failed to hire trustworthy people that aren't susceptible to that.
So that's a silver lining I guess.
Whoever gets pwned due to this might get naturally out-selected. The system works!!11 Thank you darwin.
If Satan himself proves a theorem, is it nevertheless a true theorem? Claims are either true or they are false. There is no such thing as an evil truth. Where are the breaches?
But don't you understand? The aim wasn't to prevent the breaches that would inevitably happen on day one; it was to prevent the breaches that would happen after that fact. Without mobilising everyone and getting people to patch through an event, we'd be in a far worse position.
The greatest trick that Devil performed was convincing people that he didn't exist, right?
I literally know them in person. It's a guy. They have a signal and an email right there, you can message them and talk it's not that deep
Can you tell them that they're acting recklessly here then?
Are they, though? I seriously doubt some sysadmin is going to look at this and say "Maintainers said to patch, but clearly _this guy_ knows better, so I won't."
Besides, he's got a point. The initial PoC that kept popping up on Mastodon (the ones he linked in the post as well) simply didn't work. One of them even posted an updated exploit later that still didn't work, but supposedly meant the vulnerability went from CVSS 10 to CVSS 4.
I know someone who hacked his own site using the exploit and managed to obtain a database dump.
Well, tell him from me, he'll probably regret writing the article when he reaches his thirties.
The article should be easy to refute (if it is wrong).
Chainguard broke the embargo being convinced they have the evidence of this being widely exploited already yesterday. Where is it?
> easy to refute
Please keep in mind that Brandolini's law exists, and so does a whole arsenal of stuff like the Gish Gallop.
Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and here, the extraordinary comes from that blogpost's claim, as the developers saying "yes the software we made is actually broken" is not extraordinary.
Everyone has evidence of widespread exploit attempts. I totally believe that there are widespread attempts. Where are the compromises?
what makes you so sure these would be publicized? what incentive does an adversary have to be loud about it?
And a newly registered domain only 3 days old:
Not to take away from the GP's claims but where in that whois does it say 3 days old? The page has two posts, one is "We are all doomed" and the other is "AI is bad at what it supposedly does", first post created (according to the site itself) just after the domain was registered 20 days ago.
Creation date ?
The whois creation date is 2026-10-02, which is 20 days ago. I suppose the parent misinterpreted something.
It looks to be at least 20 days old, with another blog post on the site
they have contact info. look at the first post [0] on the blog, it has their email, zkldi@proton.me
the user "zkldi" is who submitted it to hn also. seems like a real person to me.
[0] https://eliastaylor.com/software-tinderbox/
I think we do not share the same standards for "real person".
Or rather, maybe we do, but we might differ when it comes to topics where claims as big as these are made.
Why would the identity of the author relate in any way to the correctness of their claims?
The claims:
* The existing exploits don't work. * Reasoning chains producing an exploit have cheated the test.
If the claims are wrong then rebutting them is easy:
* Ask an LLM to produce a real exploit. * Test it.
Two things can be true: it's a real, exploitable CVE 10, and it's hard enough to construct that you need a good harness + verification process to keep your LLM from cheating. So, the exploit may not be easy to construct, but it doesn't actually require the artificial settings that the OP implied.
> What we demonstrated > Pre-authentication RCE on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla
[0] https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
In practical terms:
1. An attacker identifies a publicly accessible website running vulnerable PHP.
2. They send specially crafted HTTP requests to the website.
3. The requests trigger vulnerabilities in PHP's internal memory handling.
4. If exploitation succeeds, the attacker can execute arbitrary code on the server under the privileges of the affected PHP process.
This is such a strange claim from someone trying to sound knowledgable in the field of cyber security (maybe they are, I have no idea who this person is). Even if the exploit would be difficult to use properly, it's not like there's a lack of groups out there trying. Anyone serious about this would consider the fact that a working PoC was reported to the PHP security team. They confirmed the vulnerability and started making a lot of noise about the severity of it, by reporting 2 CVEs and pushing the patch to Linux distros ahead of the official patch release.
Trying to understand what the message of the post is all about, I flipped the whole thing around in my head - and the message is basically "you don't need to upgrade your servers". Which is something someone with a working exploit would say. Or it's just noise on the Internet.
Social media and "cybersecurity experts" had a big role in this. Stuff like "EU SAYS THIS IS A URGENT VULNERABILITY" and even the Prime Minister of Japan doing a nighttime PSA. They cite "the experts" posts on social media about the initial advisory, while the very same so-called experts share google search AI output mitigation strategies. None of these organizations or bodies had any details other than what was on the advisories and social media. (e.g "CVSS 10, that's bad!!")
To me, it seems more more akin to broadpwn, technically severe, wide scope (millions of iphones), yet will never be a one-size-fits-all-PWN-button.
Even in the age of AI, I don't think this is going to be weaponized down the line like how Eternalblue was... but I'm not the social media cybersec guy with 15000 followers, so don't take my words at face value ;)
I feel like half of working in the cybersecurity industry is just cultivating your social media persona. It's bizarre. I left a viral up-and-coming startup over it. It was mixing into everyone's personas at work in weird and uncomfortable ways, as someone who doesn't use traditional social media.
It’s unfortunate but you’re correct.
There are a few “social media famous” cybersecurity folks really worth their salt who didn’t immediately dumpster their morals and skills at the first sign of an ego boost.
People like Krebs, Allison Nixon, Joanna Rutkowska.
Most of them though are just addicted to likes as it’s become a core part of their self worth.
Most cybersecurity is performative, like war, cybersecurity is mostly boring and if you are doing your job, zero drama. If you want to stand out you need piercings and hot takes.
The pop culture makes you think cybersecurity is wearing black clothes, having wild tatoos and jacking-in the matrix with a dripped up thinkpad while at the back of a nightclub. Turns out, its wearing suit, and showing slide to corporate begging them to have a review process for their firewall and a decommission plan for their 20 years old services made in java 6 and never updated.
I would argue that Krebs is exactly the type of guy who will do anything for a good story, whatever it costs. I saw him lying more than once and this eroded my trust completely.
I think you’re talking about Brian Krebs while the person you’re replying to is talking about Chris Krebs.
Both of them are well known in cybersecurity but are very different people with very different reputations.
Would you have examples to share? I'm genuinely curious.
Marketing, for a while, has been about the personalities of the people involved - socMed just amplifies that
Not everything needs to be abbreviated
I actually rather like 'SOCMED', given that social networks these days can be weaponized in various ways, so it deserves a name akin to 'OPSEC' and other military-like terms
you'll find egomaniacs in any industry. From experience the people who actually speak regularly at cybersecurity conferences do tend to have a "cult of personality" aura about them. Part of it is industry incentives too. If you have a bunch of stuff on Github / technical blog posts / social media presence it helps a lot finding a job. So I wouldn't necessarily entirely blame them for cultivating a social media persona.
It’s not. Social media personas is most of what gets seen, hence your understandable conclusion. What most don’t see are those who do not give a damn about that and just do the work.
So I have been failing to do half of my career this whole time?
The people you hear from are famous personalities... That's the nature of being a famous personality. There are plenty of us who are just normal people with opinions of our own and no desire to cultivate a public name or face for ourselves...
People seem to not understand that cybercriminals are lazy, as well. They're not gonna sink a lot of effort into doing something technically impressive when there are way easier ways to generate a decent ROI. Why would they mess around with remote heap grooming when there are plenty of nday rce in widely-deployed enterprise slop just laying around, makes no sense.
For me, what was strange is there were no write-ups on how the vulnerability actually worked. It really does feel like a lot of people went "Claude found a bug, and Claude says it's dangerous" but no one actually verified how exploitable it actually is? Not to say its worth ignoring, but compared to Heartbleed (where exploits had to be written by hand) there are a lot fewer active PoCs.
There are multiple write-ups on how the vulnerability works. The Calif one is the most detailed. Also, no one used Claude. There's a whole world of information out there when you read the original sources instead of social media distortions.
https://calif.io/php2shell/
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet initiative, with Wiz also independently discovering and reporting both vulnerabilities
https://openai.com/index/coordinated-disclosure-of-critical-...
> Using Gemini 4 Argon, the team at Wiz has shown why frontier AI is a game-changer for cyber defense. For over a decade, these critical vulnerabilities remained unaddressed because vulnerability discovery and exploitation were incredibly complex.
- Raluca Ada Popa, Head of Gemini Security, Google DeepMind
See? No Claude. Never mind that other man behind the curtain
Neither of those are Claude. Checkmate.
They even did try Claude Mythos earlier in the year, and it didn't find this. There's a reason "no-one used Claude" for this now.
"Earlier this year, we worked with Alpha-Omega to scan PHP with Anthropic's Claude Mythos. But since the Mythos scan, we have added other tools, including OpenAI's Daybreak Red for validating reports and exploits, alongside sanitizer builds and reproduction environments that match our CI on every platform PHP supports."
https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit...
The fact that Mythos didnt find this is pretty damning for Anthropics claims.
Haven't you heard? The popular thing to do nowadays is to accuse someone of using AI the second anything is produced whatsoever.
Interestingly enough there are papers that suggest that AI feeding on itself will degrade output quality over time. What I've noticed from my peers is that everything produced now looks the same, and they're sick of it.
Someone had to say it:
DSHR's Blog
I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Coprophagia Is Bad For You
https://blog.dshr.org/2026/06/coprophagia-is-bad-for-you.htm...
I do tend to disclose my use of AI, but at the same time I don't feel like I'm required to. I'm doing it to signal that my use of AI was productive, and of value to people beyond myself.
but... Calif have said that AI did find this bug.
This is the official exploit video in the writeup - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfWZrdzvooc
This is the least professional Video I’ve ever seen for anything like this. I can’t even follow what’s happening on screen.
that's the point: it essentially shows (notice the --profile-flag) the work of 2 months making the exploit work reliably on every app-php/fpm-linux-combination. The only purpose is to spread fear - and then have 50% of the internet update to a patched version with 425 changed files reviewed by ~100people and their clankers at 1400 UTC sharp while for the vast majority (using fpm like recommended for ~10years everywhere...) disabling the progress-something-flag and (optionally...) disabling multipart-uploads would have nicely mitigated this.
Have you tried asking Claude? Maybe we're in the age of agent-to-agent communication /s
The video looks like it's making this whole thing out to be a joke. Everything about it conveys a lack of seriousness. The dancing cartoon character, the ascii art, the music, the whiz-bang visual effects that obscure anything interesting or useful.
> The Calif one is the most detailed. Also, no one used Claude.
be me
click link
typical ai-designed website
"it's not claude"
Agreed. The only main post was somebody on jackly something .com who overdosed on the matrix and communication skills of a squirrel picking random tokens from a dozen trees.
I'm actually curious if a lot of shit got hacked because so far it doesn't seem so. Though it seems like it should have? We always see these catastrophic vulnerabilities showing up but when are the ones where it is actually just widespread publicly dumping databases everywhere and at a point where someone non technical even registers it.
I'm sure there is more to it than generally "ask Claude". I asked Claude this as a joke and it downgraded all the way to Sonnet before it would answer, and I was previously approved for their dual use cyber program.
The latest POC video for the php2shell exploit features a dancing anime girl. How would you create a video like this?
> How would you create a video like this?
You would need to hire the team that made the original video (which as of this comment has 148 million views)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_zad39Uhw
I'm not saying the 'Claude says this is bad so therefore it's bad' is at the heart of this PHP vuln, but I'm also seeing the same phenomenon in workplace settings with 'meatproxy'-behavior of so much AI use that tends to overfit and hyperfocus on narrow issues, that then punts the work to other people in ways that just waste time (whereby pre-AI, humans would simply not have the capacity to investigate minuscule issues so they'd never be reported as such). But these days, it's just hardcore meatproxy and reverse centaur vibes all over the place (people just acting as the face of AI, and creating so much work that the other people can't really keep up with any of it anymore), and I wouldn't be surprised if that's happening to some extent in infosec more broadly too. (not saying the vulns and exploits aren't real - but there's definitely a long tail of them now where only a few are deserving of a lot of attention, patching, mitigations etc).
The writeups showed up after 14UTC, after the embargo. All of those clowns sharing non working PoCs didn't actually know the bug, they only contributed to the general hysteria
I ran 2 PoCs from GitHub today: one indeed expected Local File Inclusion (LFI) to already be present (so it's just LFI with extra steps), and the other one didn't work at all out of the box without some modifications (although I used the same Docker images and all). The second PoC did trigger a real stale write bug in the end, but it didn't demonstrate actual RCE; it just triggered a stale write. And then I wondered, is this the first time ever that the PHP runtime has had a memory corruption bug? I doubt it (I remember a few years ago we had random crashes in production under high load due to an opcache bug). And if it's not the first memory corruption bug in the PHP runtime, why is it being proclaimed the worst vulnerability in years?
There is an argument to be made that taking down such a sizable chunk of the Internet automatically qualifies it as a pretty severe vulnerability, even if no actual exploits were involved in causing it.
More seriously, though, I read it as bad because of the potential. All versions of PHP going back a full two decades were affected, all users of PHP are affected regardless of which features they use, and it’s still unclear if there’s an effective mitigation. So the blast radius if anyone does/did have a working exploit would have been enormous.
It didn't 'take down a sizable chunk of the Internet'. Site owners took down their sites because of FUD and mass hysteria.
It's not getting tripped by "mass hysteria" to be careful and go offline for a couple hours.
Your average site is fine at 99.9% uptime.
We do need to eventually see the proof that this was so urgent. Because if it wasn't then this was effectively a massive DOS attack on society.
"9.2" is a big claim and a powerful justification for action, but with OpenAI involved my faith is very low that this isn't largely a publicity stunt. Especially given the age of the vulnerability.
This should be somewhat testable.
I'd set up a model with cyber capabilities, maybe GLM 5.3, not sure if it needs to be abliterated?
Disable web access and let it work on exploiting the pre-patch PHP version in a VM, given the info we had yesterday.
Can it do it? How long does it take, and writing the findings into a skill, how quickly can it be used on new targets?
I'd be interested in giving it a try, but unfortunately I'm very busy this week.
It's risk assessment, nothing more. Some weighed the risk high and paused their site. Nothing wrong with that and not hysteria or FUD.
I think the article is suggesting that a sober risk assessment was not done by most folks period, not that they merely perceived the risk differently.
You've got under 5 minutes to decide whether or not a widely reported critical security vulnerability actively being exploited in the while is severe enough to warrant taking down your site or not. The downside for taking down your site is approximately 0, and the upside is that you don't get shrekd
No security expert can or should work that fast. Its a completely reasonable thing to do given the hyperbolic reporting just in case it turns out to be true. Some websites being down for a few hours doesn't end the world
Presumably the lack of sober risk assessment was on the part of the hyperbolic reporters.
Agreed. This is all lazy chair hindsight talk, maybe by those not affected by it. In the moment you act on the imperfect information you have available and you use the safe than sorry rule. And to demand perfect information is also a fallacy, it doesn’t exist until after the fact.
I'm in charge of my employer's ecommerce website. To me there's a critical difference in severity between a RCE vulnerability and being to takedown/crash a website.
This is all hindsight talking. You act on the information as it becomes available. At the moment, the being safe than sorry rule applied.
> why is it being proclaimed the worst vulnerability in years?
Also announced today: OpenAI’s software vulnerability initiative.
Do you mean Daybreak and/or Patch the Planet? They are not new (https://openai.com/index/patch-the-planet/)
Or do you mean something different?
I mean Patch the Planet. This was the first I had heard of it, and I assumed from seeing the press releases from OAI working their way through journalism’s digestive tract that it was announced today - but perhaps it was previously announced.
If that is case, I’ll refine my statement to “Also happening today: OpenAI is doing a PR push on their software vulnerability initiative”, which I think suffices to convey the same meaning as the original.
Docker images from Wordpress, joomla, and drupal were all exploitable.
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
Name a more iconic trio when it comes to exploits.
But these communities all patched it immediately too. Does that not say something about the iconic trio when it comes to responsiveness?
They've had a lot of practice. Usain Bolt was also really fast because he ran a lot.
Not a trio, but Magento beats all of these 3 combined when it comes to being an exploitable POS.
Windows, Exchange, Active Directory.
Article's very vague about how the RCE actually works. They talk about the memory corruption bugs but not how exactly those become RCE.
Revealing that before people have had time to update, or it is already being exploited widely just increases the risk that more attacks will happen. I'd be sceptical if we don't get info eventually, but for now, things being vague is expected.
Yeah, I also got a POC working against a live serve.
The author of the article made a critical mistake in gaining my trust. He said the POC's don't work and told me to run it.
--Which-- POC's, Charlie? Why aren't you giving a full listof what you tried. This isn't reddit, and you're not doxxing or attacking anyone. Post the links. Give sources or shut up.
There are two linked in the article
Which POC did you get running against a vanilla unmodified php server. Which server, which OS?
According to "Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security" discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50182987
* Regarding one CVE, "Remote code execution was also confirmed on PHP-FPM through application-level code paths."
* Regarding the other CVE, "A use-after-free and worker crash were confirmed, and the reporter demonstrated remote code execution against a real-world application running on Apache with mod_php."
Since those exploits exist, I expect that LLMs will duplicate them soon.
Related LiveOverflow video about fake exploits going around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CiZmq2llDg
That said, OP is basically full of shit. This is absolutely exploitable and people are going to just assume the platform and ABI and spray it against the internet, particularly hoping for mod_php.
Aren't most PHP sites out there running mod_php anyway?
15 years ago absolutely. Most modern sites will be running php-fpm (or maybe FrankenPHP)
Yeah, I don't think I've touched mod_php ever since Apache 2.4 came up with mod_proxy_fcgi, allowing dead simple integration with php-fpm.
PHP does need to invest more in the built-in web server, though. Last time I checked, they still recommend against using it in production.
All other popular runtimes provide a standards-compliant HTTP daemon that any other HTTP daemon can proxy to, it's just the way things work nowadays. Insisting on FastCGI limits integration with more modern web servers and HTTP-speaking middleware.
>This is absolutely exploitable...
OK, can you share a working one so we can test that our servers are fixed?
Can you share a patch or test program to test the issue?
I have the feeling that for some time now the CVE scores are insane. A while back we have a security issue with a dependency in Java that had a score of 9 I believe. It had a requirement that the attacker had root access.
If they're so confident this isn't exploitable this person should stand up a very basic nginx running php-fpm server running in an exploitable version of PHP and invite people to exploit it.
I totally agree. We can sit here and posture all day, maybe it might justify our paychecks. Exploit it and show me why it’s fucked. Otherwise it’s just words
As Linus says: talk is cheap; show me the code
Bonus points put cryptocurrency private key on their server as bounty.
I ain't paid to find exploits in PHP, but I will be fired if our shit gets hacked. So I'm taking down the servers until there's a patch.
There's been a patch since yesterday.
There seems to be a group of actors, both in this thread and the one about the PHP release, that try to convince readers that patching existing PHP installations is not that critical.
I think this group has a good reason for not wanting PHP installations to get patched.
Some of them have Karma numbers around 75 and accounts created in mid September.
On the other hand, my local qwen model (3.8-flash-next) was trying to convince me that the eMudhra CA thing is no big deal since you need to be "positioned correctly" (eg: any wifi network) to be able to MITM, and most of the IOT devices would have patched stuff by now.
Ah yes, IoT devices, known for their rock solid security
sounds like you quantized it a bit too hard
The CA thing is bad, but in practice a lot more high effort to exploit. As a prerequisite the attacker has to be present on the same network, which makes any individual attack a lot more high effort. In contrast for something like PHP2Shell (if exploitable) any PHP instance exposed on the internet can be attacked by anyone from anywhere.
With a MITM, you also mainly breach confidentiality, but this doesn't directly give you an exploit chain to pwn the device (though the many auto-updaters people are using nowadays might be one).
For IOT devices, there are also factors that limit the exposure. The certs are only from 2025/2026, so few devices with them installed are likely present in any given home, and depending on the hardware footprint devices may only come with the few select CAs bundled that they require due to size constraints anyways.
> It isn't a Log4J moment.
The difference is that PHP has a long history of vulnerabilities while platforms like Java don't. And as bad as Log4Shell was, it wasn't a problem with the core runtime. It wasn't even a problem with the most popular logging framework at the time.
I wouldn't downplay this.
> It wasn't even a problem with the most popular logging framework at the time.
I can't say if it was most popular overall, but it (Log4Shell) was a nightmare for many F500 companies.
My employer at the time didn’t use log4j, but we were still plenty vulnerable. All sorts of open source packages we used had a transitive dependency on it.
Very few opensource packages actually used log4j directly. Libraries generally use some sort of shim like commons-logging or slf4j so they can log into whatever your application chooses as a long sink.
Merely declaring a transitive dependency didn't mean that the code was executing nor did it mean that user input was actually being logged through those libraries.
Log4j v2 (the vulnerable version) just wasn't that common at the time. Most everyone had moved on to Logback, and Log4j v1 (not vulnerable) was still more popular than v2.
Was it actually though? I worked at an MSP at the time and our tools were just flagging the mere existence of the library. It either wasn't being used or wasn't exposed in any meaningful way. Oh a dev happens to have it installed on his laptop? Who cares.
I remember our infosec person instructing us to verify we don't use log4j in our system written in PHP. Well, we didn't :)
I'd disagree. log4shell was a monster to patch and figure out what is and isn't vulnerable.
upgrading php is much easier.
It's a weird move for this post to simultaneously line this vulnerability up against Log4Shell (very few serversides are going to measure up to L4S) and insinuate that it's not practically exploitable at all.
If it was just "everyone take a breath, we've been through something worse with Log4Shell", that would make a lot more sense.
Core run time vulnerabilities in PHP, the language and runtime itself, are rare. I remember the days when an exploit in the JVM was a daily announcement. To the point where they had to ban java applets from the web.
> Core run time vulnerabilities in PHP, the language and runtime itself, are rare.
They may be rare today but they have historically been very common.
> To the point where they had to ban java applets from the web.
Those are not RCEs, they were sandbox violations. Sandboxing untrusted code is hard and really only javascript engines have pulled it off. Java and Dotnet gave up, and that's fine.
PHP's security failures are not from trying something ambitious. They're from generating web content on a server. These are not comparable.
Did they learn not to fix overflows by checking a variable for "> PHP_INT_MAX"? That patch was hilarious. But you might have to meet Perl greybeards to understand the fun the internet made of the PHP core devs after that.
> The difference is that PHP has a long history of vulnerabilities while platforms like Java don't.
Some software written in PHP has a long history like that.
PHP itself mostly dont. Tbh runtime itself has fairly stellar track record on security considering it written in C.
> The difference is that PHP has a long history of vulnerabilities while platforms like Java don't.
What makes you say that? I know several websites that ran on unpatched PHP 5 versions for over a decade, without a care in the world until now, because there were no known serious vulnerabilities in the interpreter itself.
> We all deep down know that PHP is insecure
Do we? This was certainly true years ago. But I haven't really thought that modern PHP was any worse than any other scripting language.
I think thats said tongue in cheek.
Yeah, given that the next bulletpoint is:
- The exploit video had an anime girl in it
That's a false dichotomy. PHP is mainly used in creating web pages, and a scripting language is not a requirement there.
If you compare it with production languages, PHP looks pretty weak.
"Production languages" is a false dichotomy by implying PHP isn't one.
I think PHP is fine as long as you use a maintained framework, at least in my experience. I've used SlimPHP and Yii2 in the past and never had any security issues. I've worked on a few PHP sites that rolled their own frameworks which in retrospect was pretty iffy. One of them got yearly pen tests and there were never any issues found but the other two probably had some latent issues.
In my Slim PHP application container, the only way I could reproduce the PHP2SHELL behavior was by adding `index.php` and `upload.php` from the attached gist to the webroot.
As others have said, there are probably other ways to reproduce it, but it requires a lot of prior knowledge of the app environment, or at least a good guess.
https://gist.github.com/mashiox/462e15b45a4c891b3a843e11b1d2...
> So why was everyone so scared?
> Because:
[…]
> 3. The exploit video had an anime girl in it
Lol, somehow I had missed this. Since I had to dig a bit for it, here it is for everyone’s enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfWZrdzvooc (via https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce)
Anime girl level cataclysmic security events definitely don't worry me as much as laughing man (笑い男) cataclysmic events; only then it's when I really start to panic.
What is this in context of? Is the Laughing Man commonly used in (maybe Japanese) hacks?
All I know of Laughing Man in relation to exploits is from a small niche MMORPG called Toontown Online ( https://youtu.be/sGED1WcJhOM ).
It was used in a fairly popular anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
One of the Ghost In The Shell animated series featured that face you saw in the video you linked.
https://ghostintheshell.fandom.com/wiki/Laughing_Man
Also, High Forever track kind of bangs
the awful edit featuring an underage anime girl only exposes the childish, immature behavior of the people handling this situation, which makes this even more terrifying!
Since when is a 200+ year old immortal considered underage?
What's up with these weird ass videos with the anime girls though?
It's a normal video, I don't know what you're talking about.
Anime fans permeating throughout on the internet? Impossible. Never heard of such a thing.
Culture? In MY internet?
it's the software engineering tradition
you new here?
That dancing anime girl is from this video, "loli god requiem" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_zad39Uhw
It's a video of an underage-looking ("loli") anime girl insulting the viewer for being a pedophile.
At this point it's mostly used by pedophiles in a sorta tongue-in-cheek way.
Of course, all the best security professionals are either pedos, israelis, furries, or all of the above, so it's not really surprising.
the dancing anime girl is UI Shigure
Sounds like Ul Shigure is a VTuber (youtuber/streamer) and the anime girl is her virtual avatar?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ui_Shigure
Shigure Ui is an illustrator and vtuber. She has a teenage character which is her main character. She also has a young girl character (age 9) which is the one that was put into the exploit explanation video.
And more specifically it's the animation from this music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_zad39Uhw
For anyone wondering, this is the song https://soundcloud.com/marlonhoffstadt/highforever
If has anime girl, it means is serious
Hi, I am the CEO of Trail of Bits (https://www.trailofbits.com). We've had two of our staff independently write working exploits for this flaw. The first one took about 4 hours, start to finish. The second was a similar amount of time spread over the course of a day. We've tested our exploits to work on an unmodified MediaWiki.
tl;dr writing exploits still requires expertise, even when you're being aided by an LLM
RCEs?
I am also curious, but I do want to butt in to disagree with the point you're implying.
We've had red team exercises against our systems multiple times, and the victory always goes to someone who exploits not one thing in isolation, but a sequence of multiple they go around prodding for. It doesn't matter if this exploit goes 0 to 100%, as long as it works half way, I still want to hear of it.
I think it's a relevant question here.
Parts of the exploit chain that was laid out in the blog posts that claim an RCE were bugs that have previously been reported. Dealing with them in the past in the severity you outline would have possibly prevented the exploit chain.
However, it's specifically the ability to complete this to an RCE what makes or breaks the headlines here.
good to know! are these working generically against fpm with the multipart-progress disabled or against mod_php?
I've seen many posts like this. None of them stood the test of time. Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.
It's also not easy to pop an iPhone, but reliable, weaponized exploits are available in trade and governments use them in a plug-and-play way.
The specific controversy here is about the disclosure timeline. Some people allege that the disclosure and patch release of this vulnerability were mishandled; others dispute this. The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period. Nobody is arguing that the vulnerability doesn't need to be patched at all. (The PHP core team didn't initially treat it with much urgency, but they've acknowledged that this was a mistake.)
> The dispute turns crucially on how available exploits were during the embargo period.
I sure hope thats not true.
All signs indicate that writing a self-replicating exploit that'd flood the internet without warning is possible. All we know is that nobody did.
A lot of websites - especially the ones who made the call to go down first like government / healthcare - do not have the luxury of taking any risk.
Writing this blog post with the "hindsight" of no exploit going viral for several hours after the patches is - let me be frank - complete bullshit; and i dont want this person anywhere near an important system.
If by next _year_ nobody has proven a successful consistent hack, then we can start to doubt the videos. If there is, then all of this has been warranted.
I think it's entirely possible that the released exploit and the early released video are independent of each other. The video contains a couple of hints and stack traces, so someone could've used that to pinpoint the problem and write an exploit of their own (or, based on the website it appeared on, had an LLM generate one).
On the other hand, Chainguard did release their patches before the agreed upon time, proving they can't be trusted if you're working on coordinated patch releases. That was an absolute mess.
I guess the main takeaway is: we (humans? current methodology?) are bad at estimating how urgent a fix is or needs to be.
Time is the whole point though. Everyone was terrified and shutting their websites down because they believed the exploit would be running wild on the internet in between it hitting git and them being able to update the server.
If it takes a week to come up with a working exploit code, the critical services have time to update.
With AI i think it's safe to assume it would only take hours after you give it what/where to look
Time is part of the point, but it is not the whole point. The whole point involves the fact that this impacts two decades worth of PHP versions. Even if it took months to exploit, there is going to be a long, long tail of breaches against ill-maintained legacy sites.
Yes, but that's not really relevant to the controversy over the embargo.
Neither the OP nor any comment in this chain of replies is about the embargo?
The controversy over the embargo is why the post was written and why we're talking about this at all.
Huh, I thought we were talking about this because it's a massive security breach offering approximately unconditional RCE against half of the servers on the open web.
The specific reason for the current degree of consternation, to the point where many websites went down preemptively which didn't happen even with Log4Shell, is that for about half a day there were multiple alleged proofs-of-concept circulating on Twitter while the PHP Foundation refused to release the patch. If that hadn't been the case, we'd still be having a conversation, but a different one.
Suppose hypothetically there was no disclosure period at all. Suppose that at the time the PHP team made the announcement that there was an unmitigable unconditional RCE against ~every version of PHP with advice to take servers offline, they had just been made aware of it themselves, and simply did not have a patch ready yet. The pre-emptive taking of servers offline until a patch was available, the OP blog post that was written, and this comment thread would all still apply the same. Nothing in this thread was in any way related to the embargo period. It is extremely weird that you came into a thread irrelevant to the embargo and told me my comment was irrelevant to the embargo, and then have stuck to your guns arguing this incessantly. The embargo and the severe vulnerability are related. They are not the same thing, and much of the conversation would in fact be exactly the same regardless of the embargo.
There's no need for an embargo before the patch is available, because the core team can just not tell anyone. It's only once there is a patch that the decision has to be made whether to embargo it.
But just because there isn't a working PoC on GitHub doesn't mean there isn't one and things aren't been actively exploited.
If you are a bad actor you probably don't share your PoC around as it means less boxes to hit.
You can never rule out the possibility that someone interested in attacking you has a non-public exploit, but it's dramatically less likely if there aren't already working exploits circulating all over the internet.
It was true before great LLMs era
I don't think that's very true. Certainly, modern LLMs make it much easier to discover a vulnerability given only limited clues—but if it's easy to find that way, then probably someone will do that and post it for clout. So if no one has, then it probably isn't.
That "if" is load bearing and increasingly flat-out false.
Crowdstrike's average "breakout times", the time gap between a first successful infiltration and maximal exploitation, has gone from days or hours prior to 2024 to minutes or seconds now.
AI makes developing this exploit faster though
Time is not the whole point. How are people in this thread this clueless?
Risk is the whole point. The websites going down first were government / healthcare.
Do you expect these websites to take the risk? Risks that you now feel is justified because hindsight seemed to have collapsed the possibility-space?
We can talk about this again next year; if still nobody has demonstrated a working consistent attack that _could_ have pwnd my gov and medical records, then we can reflect on the severity score and the response.
ease is somewhat relevant initially, since it determines how quickly you have to patch before exploits start popping up. I would be extremely curious to see if anyone has been pwned by this already, especially before the public release of the patches (not that I doubt it, but I heard some people saying they saw attempts in their logs, but not really enough information to tell whether they were understanding their logs correctly. The situation just seems a bit murky and unclear to me).
> Ease is irrelevant because you only need expertise once and then everyone can reuse the result.
Not if your LLM relies on existing code and you collectively create a million repos with hallucinated broken implementations that do not work before a good public exploit exists, which later LLMs rely on. LLMs are self-defeating that way.
"Script kiddies (and script adults, who have also switched their brains off)" not something i expected to hear ever but it's so real
The only other post on this blog is "Anything connected to the internet is going to get hacked to pieces." I'm not claiming any contradiction but it is funny.
That actually increased my credence that the post is correct, because it indicates that the author isn't just a blind AI skeptic.
Where are the hacked websites? That is the litmus test. I'm looking around and I see... nothing?
Karma 4.
I have more karma, and I wonder where are the hacked websites as well.
Okay finally some sense. I felt like I was going insane seeing the freakout over this. From people who would care but a fraction if there weren't some AI angle.
I predict that this take will age poorly.
I think this is way overthinking it. It's PHP. Even 2, 3 years ago before usable LLMs, if somebody had told me there is a remote execution vulnerability in php I would have found it completely plausible.
Maybe the author does have a point. There are millions of PHP websites and do we know of any that was pwned?
It's also weird that it seem to has overshadowed certificates incident, which, to me, appears to be of at least the same magnitude of impact.
The certificates incident was mitigated by the fact it was revoked within hours so by the time people found out, it was resolved.
Yes there is a long tail of Internet of Shit devices that have a fixed non updated cert store, but these devices are being absolutely ripped to shreds by AI from all angles already.
It's not just IoT devices. It's also a very very long tail of programs which for some reason have their own copy of the CA certificates list, either because they don't trust the system's one, want to work identically on all platforms, have a severe case of not-invented-here, or all three at the same time (looking at you, Java...)
[1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/eight-bits-of-trust-emudhras-ca-key... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50177916 )
Couldn't this be enforced at the router? Intercept outbound TLS. If the client hello is to a new domain, hold it and start a new outbound connection and see if the server responds with a certificate on the CRL. If so, ban it. Otherwise let the original TLS connection proceed.
That would work with TLS 1.2, but not TLS 1.3. TLS 1.3 sends the certificate after the session key is derived and symmetric encryption is established.
The certificate incident requires a working MitM of TLS traffic. That isn't easy to pull off and browsers will immediately warn you the second they see someone try that.
The PHP exploit, as presented, runs directly from attacker to server. There's no requirement for an attacker to already be in the network.
Wiz: "These vulnerabilities include memory disclosure and unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP itself, independent of the application running on top of it"[1]
Calif: "the available exploitation paths depend on the PHP version and SAPI but are always exploitable under default configurations" ... "This results in RCE against arbitrary PHP scripts on Apache mod_php and PHP >= 5.4.0."[2]
PHP Foundation: "full remote code execution was demonstrated with default settings."[3]
Unless all of these organizations are lying, the exploit can work against a default PHP installation running a Hello World script.
[1] https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
[2] https://calif.io/php2shell/
[3] https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit...
At least with the PHP one they caveat this with "under the right conditions" which judging by what we know now, the right conditions are you've already exploited the server with a LFI
The author isn't disputing that these organizations have developed working exploits, they're saying that the exploit is difficult enough to achieve that, as far as they can tell, nobody has publicly released a working exploit except for vibe coders whose exploits rely on insane misconfigurations on the server.
With previous showstopper security bugs, once you knew the vulnerability existed the exploit was immediately obvious.
He says it isn't an easy exploit but never explains why it isn't an easy exploit?!
What kind of pisses me off was that there were kind of two sides of the continuum.
You've got the detailed technical writeup on one end in the patches themselves, and on the other end you've essentially got the AI and security companies both together (php2shell) and independently with their highly polished microsites and blog posts with attractive infographics and stylized pitch deck looking images.
Every publication on the other side of the detailed technical writeup in the patches themselves wanted to make it into a huge fucking marketing stunt first and foremost, providing absolutely zero added practical benefit or value.
https://www.php2shell.com/
https://patchtheplanet.org/
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
https://calif.io/php2shell/
People mistake OpenAI and Anthropic for AI companies, but they are in fact primarily in the business of marketing, and business is good.
Every business is in the business of marketing, that's a meaningless distinction.
There's no ai in mrketng.
My take:
I have had this take but for things like exploiting with a DRAM interposer ala Battering RAM. They say it's a low cost attack, but the amount of obstacles you need to overcome (including having root on the system and physical access) is intractable to virtually everyone, and a nation state wouldn't go to that kind of gymnastics when it is more than likely there is a quicker and easier way in.
But this? I doubt any high value targets will be exploited in the wild since news travelled fast and from what I can see pretty much most took preventative action. Looks like pretty much everyone heeded the warning and suggestions. It'll mostly be a nothing burger like Heartbleed. There'll be of course low hanging fruit of unpatched servers out there, but anything of importance would have already had active maintenance and patching.
Now that Calif has released the details, I'm sure there'll be a contingent that can actively and easily exploit this, either now or very soon, with or without the guidance of LLMs.
But yeah if someone said Battering RAM, I would say fuggedabout it, but if someone said PHP vulnerability with a CVE of 9.2, I would say patch it ASAP or bring the servers down until you can.
> but anything of importance would have already had active maintenance and patching
Mostly because people either "did it" or yelled long enough and loud enough that it "got done". There is a saying about horses and water, but some people needed to be dragged, kicking and screaming and have their faces shoved in the well.
When headlines like "there wasn't an easy exploit" come out I have burned a lot of good will, on what people will perceive as "nothing burger". The security space has a knack for making a complete mockery of itself and then wondering why no one seems to give a fuck.
"I'm getting too old for this shit" really does apply to today.
Not easy, but there are some. That's enough.
> It's been 10 hours since this vulnerability has been posted, and half the software world is looking at it, and lord knows 100,000 people have got their "superintelligence" on the case.
This is the most compelling argument presented. If this PHP vulnerability were actually so bad, we'd be probably be seeing some kind of widespread impact by now. If every potential target requires a second coincidental, target-specific vulnerability I think we should probably call off the search party.
The alternative way to describe this situation is "defense in depth". We've located a very thick part of the ship hull that we could technically drill through if we had enough time and money to do so, but this would not scale up in any meaningful way. What you can do to a vessel in dry dock vs on the open seas are two wildly different universes. Vulnerabilities located under pristine lab conditions or within the context window of a clanker do not bring me much concern.
Sorry but this post makes zero sense.
Many apps (eg chrome) frequently fix bugs that are actively exploited in the wild yet have no public weaponized chain (sometimes for months).
The fact that there is no fully public weaponized chain does not mean it does not exist or that this bug is not as scary. It only means that it is not as trivial to exploit as log4shell/shellshock/etc.
According to cloudflare [1], it is being exploited in the wild.
[1] https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051
It's like y2k. Yeah, there isn't much of a problem currently. We're patching before it becomes a problem. That's not Bot Who Cried Wolf*, that's responsible security. You don't have to wait for a YouTube tutorial on how to do it before it's something to urgently patch.
*My phone autocorrected to that and I'm keeping it.
Can you explain how you got from "attempts to exploit it" to "exploited in the wild"?
"Luckily, the window didn't break, which means the thief never existed"
https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/2026-143-...??
Makes sense
>> There's something important to be said here about how many people have Claude/GPT make design decisions for them, and how AI is the primary decision maker in the world right now.
I suppose majority of the them now...
I fell for the fear mongering, which annoys me.
It was some good drama, and honestly I didn't even know LLM was involved so heavily in it. But damn annoying that people blindly believed LLMs and I blindly believed those people.
I'm waking up in the UK and thinking about the incident in the cold light of a new day, and things actually seem far worse to me.
What about our routers? What about Home Assistant? What about IoT?
Vulnerabilities are going to surround us, many of which will never ever be patched.
We may well be fucked.
> So why was everyone so scared?
I think this section misses the mark.
The biggest problem is that for a good 12 hours nobody knew what was going on. All we knew was there is a critical vulnerability affecting all of us that allows RCE somehow and we have to have vulnerable servers open for potentially even longer.
Everyone who knew was being hush hush, only chiming in to say "nah, those workarounds don't work, you're fucked".
So when people started spreading rumors of PoC or when the Cloud flare CTO posted that they were actively seeing exploit traffic - what are we supposed to do?
We aren't sitting there trying to PoC with Claude - we're subscribing to a bunch of news feeds and twitter accounts while we try to prepare for the patch and close down what we can. We're calling executives saying "hey, how much money do we lose by being offline for 6 hours?"
So even if this isn't as easily exploitable as first believed, no one could have known that, because those with the ability to calm us down were seemingly choosing to stoke the fires.
This is (IMO) a failure of the potentially outdated disclosure system that's supposed to protect us. And at the very least a trial run of how the world may react next time, if it really is that bad.
Yeah, I suggested to take down the app someone between seeing the Gina (core) comment (saying php.ini etc changes won't do anything) and after seeing the Cloudflare CTO tweet.
Very well said. Even for non-sensitive stuff that I was told was "super vulnerable", I didn't know if this was a full, actual RCE - some places said yes, others no. Did I need to take down everything running PHP? Just the apps dealing with data I didn't want leaked? Etc.
The rather long delay in getting official Docker images didn't help; we were told "patch now!!1!!" but that apparently meant building from source.
Great reply, this hits the nail in the head and is pretty much exactly how I spent my day. Just reading, waiting and stressing while being essentially in the dark about the whole thing.
I'm assuming the next few days will probably confirm if this was mostly FUD or not.
IMO it is a little bit silly to describe “a system that works well until it intersects with a trillion dollar company’s PR campaign” as an outdated failure.
Or perhaps, trillion dollar companies should be more responsible. Either because they fear regulation that will force them to be responsible, or because there is regulation that will make the responsible.
I agree. At present I do not see any set of incentives, meta-incentives, etc., that are extant, or even rigorously imaginable[0], that will lead to such a state of affairs.
0: credit to Xenosystems for this excellent phrase
When they confuse the CA issue and the PHP issue in the opening paragraph, I have a hard time trusting their analysis
"I know, I know. It's all you're hearing about. That, and the number 4."
Doesn't look like confusion to me.
"The exploit video had an anime girl in it"
>script kiddie
Get on time, pa, they are called LLM kiddie now
The dancing anime girl was the best part of all this lk.
The original video from where the dancing girl was taken from (she's a vtuber, not in an anime) has 148 million views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_zad39Uhw
148 mil views is crazy. It goes hard with that techno and glitch effect on that PoC.
RCE is incredibly dangerous not because it lets you execute arbitrary code, but because it lets you execute some code. Code you're not supposed to execute. As soon as someone can do that, all they have to do is probe until they find something to chain.
Almost every system on the internet has some local code you can chain to gain root, or a way to put some in place. It gets worse when it affects legacy systems, because they're the bastard stepchild of security. RCE on a box that hasn't been patched since Obama's first term is what little blackhats' dreams are made of. And developers are way too lazy to intentionally design their apps into different privilege domains to protect against chaining. Unless your app runs chroot() (is my neckbeard showing?) or in a container with nothing but a Go binary, somebody can LFI it.
A crack in the door is plenty of space to get a crowbar in (especially with interpreted languages).
But the author isn't saying that this isn't a crack in the door. He says it is. It's just not a wide open door.
Reminds me of how Y2K was a "nothing burger," because of the effort that was put into making that so.
I just like to imagine the japanese PM being woken up in the middle of the night with an assistant holding a laptop, they open it and they watch the anime girl dancing around with that techno song in the background and start panicking.
It's a digression, but FTA:
> When I think about "we're very fucked" CVE10s on the Internet, I think of the following vulnerabilities:
Which is IMHO a really good list. It's also, I think, important to note that every single one of the four items is not at all a memory safety bug. They're all logic, at various levels of an interpretation stack.
I think a lot of folks with their heads down in the security world might have expected the opposite. As is often the case in engineering, the smartest people end up obsessing over solving the less important parts of the problem.
Serverside memory corruption is annoying to get working. As a dominant metagame strategy for attackers, it's much more impactful on the clientside.
(I'm not cosigning the analysis in this blog post. I think "I haven't seen a PoC I could get working" is not the evidence this author seems to think it is.)
I think Heartbleed is close enough to memory safety to count. It was caused by memory allocator returning uninitialized memory and every memory safe language I know about does not allow this in best-practice code.
(And sure, there are escape hatches - like Python has "recv_into" that could be used to implement heartbleed if you are really inclined to - but this would not be a realistic python program. In python, even with buffer reuse, you'd be using memoryview or similar that can't have a heartbleed problem)
Heartbleed was a buffer overread. Sounds like a memory safety bug... is it not?
It was.
Huh? Heartbleed is literaly memory safety (buffer over read)
The vast majority of web services are not written in memory unsafe languages so this is not surprising.
One of the exceptions (with regards to web facing attack surface in a memory unsafe language) is that people still use OpenSSL, which has a terrible history of memory unsafety, including the cited heartbleed.
[removed]
If anything, claiming that this vulnerability has been known and unpatched for 22 years supports the author's point: clearly it's not that easy to actually use.
WAS not easy, now it's much easier.
Do you have any links to a working PoC that appeared before the details were released? I'm seeing a lot of conflicting info, and I'm not really sure what to think. People saying they were seeing people trying to exploit this hours ahead of the patch release on their servers, yet no one who seemingly actually got pwned by it (were people just misreading their logs?)
Glad to be proven wrong but as far as I can see there are no reports of it currently being exploited in the wild at the scale you are implying. It genuinely takes a lot of time to weaponize even with the assistance of frontier LLM models and it is way more difficult when you don't control the server.
I largely agree with the author and it is a common annoyance in cyber security discussions where people make strong claims but have nothing to back it up with.
Clickbait bullshit from Internet nobodies.
https://www.ft.com/content/245778d9-597b-492d-b5b6-a2967c77e...
I am so annoyed… I am trying to verify the claims of this article with my friend Claude but daddy Dario won’t let me because “cyber”. I pointed it at this article and a PoC [1] I found on DuckDuckGo. We live in a stupid world. I can’t run it right now so I am trying to figure out if it’s serious.
[1] https://github.com/eness/php2shell-CVE-2026-109618-CVE-2026-...
OP seems to be implying that there's no way the UAF bug could be used to run arbitrary code with higher privileges than PHP itself, on a vanilla installation. I couldn't divine that from reading the CVE. Is that true...? Is that why you'd need PHP to exec an existing file or something? Or is that assumption just based on the fact that the PoCs so far rely on nerfing PHP? If the latter, it's a bit ironic to complain about everyone's judgment skewing toward Claude's while using Claude-generated code not doing it as circumstantial evidence that such a thing can't be done.
I'm no expert on UAF exploits. I guess one thing I'm wondering is whether the pointer to "freed" memory in this case is still pointing to memory reserved by the system for a PHP process, or if it's some address that's truly free and could be picked up by another process.
> or if it's some address that's truly free and could be picked up by another process
This isn’t a thing; virtual memory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory) is very old, and Linux has never not used it. It takes a separate vulnerability (a “local privilege escalation”) to do what you’re getting at. (However, those are plentiful, and arbitrary malicious code with PHP process privileges is often already catastrophic for a web service.)
That said,
> OP seems to be implying that there's no way the UAF bug could be used to run arbitrary code with higher privileges than PHP itself
No, nowhere does the article imply that at all.
Thanks for the explanation. Maybe I don't totally understand.
And yeah, obviously it's still dangerous to have arbitrary code running with PHP's privileges.
Just one thing: With mod_php, those httpd processes are spun up on demand. After that the memory is released to the system, right? There's no master Apache webserver process holding all those addresses.
Just for clarity, I took the OP's point to be that the only way this could be used to escalate privileges would be if there were existing scripts on the server with credentials that PHP itself could be made to exec() ...but... if you know a process is going to be spun down and no longer holds a pointer to the memory you're writing to, couldn't you theoretically write something that might be picked up by the next process? Or is that always formatted by the next process' vm?
Appreciate your patience, I'm not a low level coder.
It’d be redundant for me to write up the whole explanation here, but the short version is that every process has its own memory space, provided in a clean state by the OS, that other processes can’t read from or write to, regardless of pointer values. The same pointer value in two processes doesn’t refer to the same memory unless there’s specific coordination. Keywords you can use to read more about the long version on previous Wikipedia link.
> Or is that always formatted by the next process' vm?
So yes, that’s sort of how it is.
PHP often has access to a DB API in order to run the site; that's where the fun starts even if you are restricted to PHP's access level.