Many here call for an earlier release of the patch.
But it is not clear if releasing the fix early would make the damage smaller or larger.
Having the patch probably makes creating an exploit easier. So the number of attacks would increase.
There is no way to coordinate the whole world on an earlier time. I would guess the number of people who have to patch their instances is in the hundreds of thousands.
Everybody who actively watches the topic already has the option to shut down their instances.
So ringing the bell and getting as many people as possible to shut down their webservers now and patch at 14:00 might be the best in terms of damage minimisation.
By the way, it is not enough to just "shutdown -h now" and then later restart and "apt update && apt upgrade". The moment the machine comes back, it can get hacked. So you should make sure the webserver does not start after the next boot. For Apache this would be something like "rm /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/apache2.service" and then after patching recreate the symlink via something like "ln -s /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/apache2.service".
Boom. A leak. It's now a public fact, so we'll instantly see people exploiting it, right? Except that without a commit or patch fixing it, or even a suggestion of a workaround, you are searching for a needle in a haystack. It could be literally anywhere, after all!
In fact, it is so well-hidden that I have not even discovered it myself yet. But its presence is a statistical certainty due to the sheer size of the codebase, so we should assume it is somewhere in there. Did I just doom every W11 user, or are perhaps embargoes at least somewhat useful?
> I feel like all "non-inner-circle people" here are taken for a laugh. OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months, decided for themselves who gets access to an early fix, and then leave the rest out to dry
Had they just kept this between themselves and the vendor this would've been effective.
Instead they selectively released it to various parties one of which promptly leaked it.
I have not seen confirmation that the exploit is for the bug that is going to be patched.
It seems the published exploit can be easily prevented by filtering out multipart post requests. So people actively watching the situation can already prevent that issue by filtering those.
I was able to bring it to the point of memory corruption. It is 3 am where I am now; I will continue in the morning. As a precaution, I configured .htaccess rule.
# BEGIN php2shell-mitigation
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Content-Type} multipart [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
</IfModule>
<If "%{HTTP:Content-Type} =~ /multipart/i">
Require all denied
</If>
# END php2shell-mitigation
I added a rewritecond to ignore multipart before php-fpm receives anything. I did a similar thing for nginx servers. Also in .user.ini added "session.upload_progress.enabled = Off".
These two seem to do the trick, but again I am not 1000% sure until tomorrow morning's deeper dive. My eyes are burning, and I can't sleep because of the stress this exploit.
How does it work that some service that most people never heard of distributes (paid) images with alleged fix for vuln 24h before official vuln fix/image is available? Seems somewhat shady.
I can almost confirm a Wordpress site I manage was attacked with this. Oct 5th updated it to latest php and Wordpress. Oct 6th it was exploited with a web shell exploit
> Having the patch probably makes creating an exploit easier. So the number of attacks would increase.
I think that this made sense a few years ago but in today's world it is so feasible to give an LLM a hint and throw some cash at it to find an exploit that I don't think this calculus makes sense anymore.
> Having the patch probably makes creating an exploit easier. So the number of attacks would increase.
No matter the excuse, the security issue must be fixed. Anyone trying to delay this is not acting in good faith. I understand your rationale but that does not excuse you from being labelled as such too.
We should live in the age of open source AT ALL TIMES. No exceptions, for anyone, no matter the reasons. And that includes those who want to withhold code or patches.
Honestly, leaving everyone vulnerable and sitting on the patch while the exploits are out in the wild (i.e. no more use of delayed release) is hard to stomach.
A lot of people are going to do the math on migrating. Bugs happen everywhere. Leaving the community out in the cold and only supplying the corporate sponsors doesn't.
At this point, it would be fastest/most effective for the PHP foundation to deploy their own white-hat mass hacking attack to exploit the vulnerability and forcefully shutdown vulnerable servers.
I can't think of a faster way to clear out the vulnerable surface area.
Yeah they should poorly set up a sandbox and ask it to fix all the vulnerable servers with the remote RCE and prepare to be surprised when it escapes the sandbox.
$ docker pull php:8.4.27
8.4.27: Pulling from library/php
no matching manifest for linux/arm64/v8 in the manifest list entries
$ docker pull --platform linux/amd64 php:8.4.27
8.4.27: Pulling from library/php
no matching manifest for linux/amd64 in the manifest list entries
It's not exactly a common situation. This is an emergency for many people. They are vulnerable and unprotected, and UNABLE TO PATCH their PHP... what do you recommend them to do?
This is MIT open source, run it through your own LLM. If you find a bug, submit a fix.
If you're paranoid, launch it as a Linux user with no access to any files. It's just supposed to proxy some network requests.
Shut down the affected services until they can install the patch. This issue is widespread enough that users will understand. Many government etc sites are affected too.
People unable to patch PHP probably aren't the same people who can be trusted to audit every piece of open source code they interact with. Even in the advent of AI.
I'm sure you have the best intentions. I still think anyone trying to fix a massive security hole by running random 10 minute old code from Github isn't really being smart about it.
Major Japanese services like pixiv and e-commerce platforms have elected to turn off services until patches are available. If you're smaller than pixiv, you can afford to go down for a few hours.
I've tried to take one website on a shared hoster down. But I actually can't disable PHP there at all. So no idea if just taking down the website will fix it. Probably PHP won't get executed if no .php files are served, but I'm not sure.
For everyone wondering why the patch is not out yet:
There are a handful people responsible for doing a release. They are still asleep.
To be honest, I am also shocked, that the exploit was published that quickly, after the leaked video (which was the reason, why the announcement happened in the first place, at that specific time). We expected a bit more time, even with LLMs...
We've been working with the team on the coordinated disclosure, but I made the call to get these out early when exploits hit in the wild.
The vulnerability and patch are both very complex, and the maintainers did an incredible job on this one. We tested the patch extensively and it's holding up well.
We've made these images free and will keep them that way.
"We took our website down this morning when the "PoC"s were released, only serving a static website. Our customers were not pleased. Then we got contacted by Chainguard affiliates using our public support form if we would like to schedule a meeting with them, so that they could sell us their security services."
What an incredible irresponsible move essentially 0-daying everyone who was working toward coordinated disclosure to ensure everyone had images or distro packages to update to.
Publishing a patch beforehand potentially multiplies the impact. Now the actual bug(s) can be diffed from the source. Whereas existing PoCs (after verifying whether it even works), obfuscated at least a bit about the details. It is not so clear what is the best approach.
Yesterday the actual bugs plus many more (though less critical) were discovered by the people pointing their LLMs at it. I am confident no new bugs will be found by looking at binary diffs compared to what was already surfaced.
Yes but they obtained this information based on the one-sided courtesy of another party, under a scheme that tried to get as many people to safeguard together.
If the first party to receive this information says, "Wow, of course I must act on this, because customers are on the line," then it makes sense to simply choose who you tell more carefully or not at all.
If you saw customer data was being compromised; financial data, government data, electronic patient records etc, and you had the fix. Would you do nothing?
The alternative isn't "doing nothing". It's raising the issue in the coordination group so that everyone can collectively decide on a new timeline if necessary, and you aren't leaving everyone else hanging out to dry.
If you want to 'adopt' a new reality, you talk to all parties, and everyone moves up the release. That's how agreements and trust work. If you don't do so? No one will trust you ever again.
It seems like you don't agree with coordinated releases as a standard. That's fine, but irrelevant here. If you agree to coordinate, so that you can get inside info on security updates and be prepared, and then break that agreement, you're not trustworthy. No hand wavy reasons will change this fact.
I don't know many who want to deal with untrustworthy people.
what exactly is the point of maintaining coordinated disclosure even if one believes in it wholeheartedly in the case where the thing in question is under active exploitation already and there is no longer any hope of quietly solving the issue before active exploitation begins?
are we to somehow count the hypothetical future exploitees that may yet be helped by avoiding disclosure 1–1 against the actual literal current exploitees harmed by further postponing the fixes landing?
The question is where do you spend your trust. If you think that you'll always be able to find and patch 0-days before anyone else into the indefinite future then it's fine to defect.
If you want your customers to believe they won't be hung out to dry when the broader community patches before they can because you're no longer in the loop, you cooperate.
It's not like this is the last 0-day that will need to get patched and deployed in a hurry. "Not slower to patch than
virtually anyone else" is a pretty sustainable place to be.
what possible reading of "I made the call to get these out early when exploits hit in the wild" contorts into "these exploits hit in the wild after i made the call to get these out early" with flipped causality?
sure, i'm happy to recant my rather tepid defense of chainguard in the case that what was said upthread was a blatant fabrication. i'm even open to being convinced that it was.
as it stands though, what i replied to wasn't a useful addition to the discussion. it could easily become so by either being made contingent upon the possibility of that being a lie, or being bundled with an assertion like yours that chainguard is not to be taken at their word. doing neither and simply responding as if a causally opposite statement had been made is just a non sequitur.
I don't think we have to not-believe Chainguard. To me, the problem is more that "in the wild" is a somewhat airy statement that can only be taken to strictly mean that one found it somewhere on a computer that is connected to other computers. This is almost a non-statement, as airgaps are the exception rather than the rule.
Even then, it implies more than it says. It's often used to suggest the exploit came from a remote system one does not directly control and was deployed, successfully, against another system one does not directly control. But even that does not necessarily have to be true, as people can use it, without any bad faith and not trying to twist the phrase, in cases where only one of those conditions hold, e.g. against a system one does directly control where the exploit attempt was unsuccessful.
Not a non sequitur - No one should be taken at their word. Not them, not me, and not you. This is the security world. Nobody is trusted altogether.
Breaching an embargo, makes reverse engineering easier. We don't need to analyse motives or pontificate. Disrupting the supply chain... Disrupts the supply chain.
I find it really interesting how no one has been able to produce a POC after the blogs hit the public. Something key was probably omitted from the disclosure to prevent exactly this.
How? Biggest organisations and shared hosting providers had a chance to patch and protect their users. Everyone else will learn about the vulnerability the second patch comes out (this is also fixable with a configuration chance, so nobody needs to wait for their distro). This was the right approach and it worked.
They didn't release the patch out of fear that someone would quickly use the patch to develop an exploit, meaning an exploit is available shortly after the patch.
What they have achieved by delaying the patch is that exploits are now available publicly before a patch.
Also they could’ve sent patches to at least some trusted members/maintainers/distros/hyperscalers/big Hosters/plesk/cpanel.
It would’ve been easier to make some kind of coordinated release.
The problem is that, since proofs-of-concept have leaked but the patch isn't available, bad guys can attack any site whose operators aren't part of the club, and the only thing the operators can really do to prevent that is to take the site offline. (PHP core team has denied that the configuration change fixes the problem.) I would call this a significantly worse outcome than everyone finding out about the vulnerability at the same time, since in that case operators can take timely action if they get the news quickly enough.
People here tend to be part of the silicon Valley insider club that gets access to all the cool offensive models, the expensive licensed software and services and insider information under NDA
This is something of a fallacy. "The Industry" cannot learn.
But laws and regulations can require better security.
As in the history of seatbelts in vehicles, tech tool stacks are insecure by design and no one is ever really held accountable... until the cost is deemed too high.
It's evident that we have not reached that limit yet.
This is nonsense, disappointed to see that publicly from a core dev. Yes, some people are asleep, but the decision was made to wait, to ensure the patch is only made available when users are actually able to install the update and we're giving distros the time to build PHP packages.
That's horribly naive with an installed base this size and if you are that geographically dependent then I would hope to read how this will be dealt with going forward.
Can you please explain what you mean rather than asking questions like this?
I think you are assuming I am running PHP which I haven't used in production for more than a decade. That doesn't change the fact that if you power this many websites that you should have a plan in place for when there is a critical issue.
Honestly, kindarails2shell resulted in a responsible disclosure coordination followed by the decision to release early since it was reversed too quickly. Even just a hint of a 0-day is enough to cause people to look for it and exploit it with LLMs.
lmfao what... If the police woke me up to fix anything the only thing they'd get out of me is "lawyer". And I wouldn't put a single iota of effort into fixing that thing until the entire matter with the police was resolved. If you want someone's attention on something, especially something nuanced and intricate like a software bug, that's absolutely not how you get it.
Depends on the tone of the police, but if they’re just waking you up and make sure you take a call from your boss, then are on their way, why not.
Beats panicked boss banging on the door. If there’s one thing I cannot handle while doing something critical in production, it’s panicked boss in the same room as me.
How are the policemen waking you up if not pounding on your door or breaking it down? Or if they found a key under a mat and are beside your bed shaking you awake.
In those cases I'd rather the boss pounding at the door at least I could call the police and have them removed.
A civilian government official outside of law enforcement could be a safer pick. A CISA representative (or any non-US country's equivalent department/ministry of cybersecurity) could achieve the same outcome, or even better, as they'd have more technical background to explain what's going on.
If it's just a phone call, why involve the police at all? But if that doesn't work, and it's critical that someone is woken up and no one is near, I could see the police as a reasonable option.
I agree with GP that my first instinct would be "lawyer", but I'm imagining the police at the door saying something like "hey we're here to inform you there's an urgent xyz, we'll now be on our way" and leaving. At that point that's the police matter resolved, no?
What "harassment"? Anyone is allowed to ring the doorbell or knock on your door in the middle of the night, if they think they need to inform you of something urgent. Why would it be harassment if the police does it?
Given that this affects every PHP version from the past decade, and that the exploit instructions are circulating at the top of twitter, and that there's no fix available yet, it doesn't seem outrageous to assume every major PHP website is already compromised?
The upgrade instructions here should include torching your hosts and starting again.
I would assume that in many (smaller, non-professional) systems/code bases, it is also possible to poison the backups and code base in general. This would have been a major effort in the pre-LLM age, but it should be pretty easy now. As soon as such instructions are out there, people (or rather LLMs) are going to find ways to make the threat persist.
People love hating on PHP. But Go has CVEs like every week, and people are getting tired of updating it. I don't think there is a fundamental "PHP bad" argument beyond just "hating on it". While Go/Node have grown much more than PHP, PHP is definitely alive.
govulncheck tells me if my codebase is actually affected by CVEs or not. So if there's 50 CVE'd modules but my codebase doesn't use them, I sleep.
Secondly, the fix is almost always "go get -u <affected module>", and because it's a CVE, it's usually just a bugfix release and still completely compatible with how I'm using it... but I run the test suite to be more certain.
I think the actual difference is that for Go there is likely a build pipeline set up, while for PHP most people can't even touch the binary, because they have a shared hoster. I would sure love to be able to just recompile PHP right now.
> Rust is literally the best positioned language to handle the upcoming onslaught of CVEs.
Rust is also a language with no real stdlib, and so you have to import crates for everything including the kitchen sink.
Which opens you up to the very real risk of supply chain vulnerabilities unless you make an active effort to code review your imports and keep the length of your import list under control.[1][2][3]
Rust supporters also need to urgently realise that memory safe != secure. It is very much possible to have vulnerabilities in memory safe code.
This has been demonstrated by Cloudflare[4] and countless others.
Age-old vulnerability classes such as input validation, error handling and many others are still very much possible in a Rust codebase.
So please. Yes, I'm sure Rust is a fantastic memory-safe language. But do not portray it as being magically immune from CVEs.
If you "really" want to secure the web you reduce the blast radius - there's absolutely no reason that most websites (99% static) are served live from CGI_BIN.
Well-architected solutions would have the static part broken out so only the dynamic content is on a separate domain/host and that part can be secured as needed. Then something like this only turns off your forms/upload dialogs.
Not who you’re replying to, but Rust lacks things I assumed were basics in any modern language, like random number generation, JSON handling, and regex. I understood the reasoning once I looked into why, but it was still startling at first.
In contrast (I know this is apples to oranges), Python’s stdlib is incredibly broad. colorsys lets you convert between color spaces. plistlib lets you read and write Apple’s property list files. graphlib has a topological sorter, which can lead to hilariously short interview questions when the interviewer isn’t familiar with Python’s stdlib.
I'm not rising to that bait. I'm sure you know perfectly well what I mean.
So let's just be polite, cordial and leave that topic there there. I'm sure you know its a topic that attracts 'strong views', particularly from the Rust side, which is no doubt why you're trying to engage on it.
The only times I had to use third party packages for basic stuff, was when developing embedded software on limited hardware.
Do you mean that for async we need third party runtimes like tokyo? Or that types and utilities that many other languages ship by default in stdlib, like http aren't in rusts?
I'm sorry for the tone of my post. It was meant as honest surprise, but I clearly see now how it sounds baity and provoking.
The conversation should be about having more variety in structural components, not less: if you kill php and everyone starts using Go for example, the next CVE found in Go will impact as much. The real way is to have more widespread ecosystems.
Not the one you are replying to, but an argument I heard is that
1) It is now much easier to work in a language with better security features such as Rust. Previously, there definitely was some kind of trade-off between accessibility, performance, and security, and some people argue that this is over. I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible.
2) You can now translate your legacy projects to a different language much more easily. This is definitely true, but that doesn't mean it doesn't introduce new/other problems or that it is easy enough (again, I simply don't know).
2 makes sense. 1 is immensely scary as an argument.
If you don't understand the language(eg, not easy to work with), don't work professionally in it. All LLM work need audit, a second set of eyes, just as work from a coworker needs peer review prior to sign off.
How can one peer review an LLM without full, experienced knowledge?
Sure, im referring to systems being turned off even if they are not running PHP at all. Out of fear of spillover effects or because they are unsure what they are running.
It’s probably advisable to go through your password manager and start deleting any accounts you no longer use. And of course make sure that you have zero shared passwords
The exploit is already out. Yeah this looks like it's going to go on history as the worst vulnerability ever. And now with LLMs you'll likely see tens of thousands of agents hacking any php website out there within hours.
Yup, I'm seeing several legit people on X claiming to have seen or found the exploit. Some say that: turning session.upload_progress.enabled off and setting file_uploads = Off will mitigate. But others are claiming that those steps are not enough and "Upload progress can serialize before basic RINT clears BG(serialize)". So, I'm taking no chances and taking my services offline.
I think this exploit + agentic AI (which allows for rapid secret exfiltration/utilization) may be a potent enough combo to trigger a sort of Kessler Syndrome for network security.
If the problem is in the parser then `file_uploads = Off` doesn't help, PHP still parses the multipart body. That seems to be why they're talking about blocking multipart/form-data on routes that don't take uploads and rate-limiting those that do.
To be honest that clueless individual and its pathetically lame security practices made him lose 800 000 Bitcoin belonging to its customers with Mt Gox, which was written in... PHP.
And he went to prison for a few years for it. So he knows something about PHP exploits.
Log4Shell was on a library called Log4J, used by many (but also not that many: Logback is equally as used and wasn't affected by the same vuln). This is straight up php the language.
It depends? I recall being on incident response and checking for that specifically (I worked in a big java shop at the time and was responsible for stuff like this). It was alot of screaming online, but things like Spring Framework used to pull Log4J v1 (ie: not affected) and spring-boot (the modern, way more used one) used Logback (also not affected). You'd get it from like a Kafka/Elastic dependency or similar, but only if you didn't have an SLF4J handler.. like spring would ship Logback for example. Which makes me thing, in general other java shops were mostly not affected as well, given spring is basically the go-to on the java world.
Extremely legacy software wasn't affected either (log4j v1 or apache commons-logging!). Lots of automated scanners flagging the idle jar as well (when the app used Logback for example as the SLF4J implementer, but the scanner saw a transitive for the log4j jar and would scream at you - that's when I stopped caring about github vuln scans btw, it was a shitshow).
Like dont get me wrong, it was a bad vuln, but to me it seems like it was more hype machine and internet screaming than actual vulnerable applications. I do recall Minecraft was vulnerable though, that one was indeed a big target given publicly exposed servers and such.
As a percentage of websites, though, Java is far from ubiquitous. It's probably not even double digit percentages. PHP, meanwhile, is some 70% of websites. So in terms of exploit targets, this is 10x that of Log4J, maybe.
The vulnerability also required you to log arbitrary user provided strings and maybe some other precondition that I can't remember. Nothing at my workplace at the time was affected despite using log4j since user provided data was either parsed (e.g. a uuid) or private/not something we would log.
I'm not them, but I'd say Conficker and those other windows file share worms were worse. They went after peoples personal computers rather than web servers so affected people less aware of how to deal with it. It's a little early to tell what this php one will all affect though.
Mindboggling, wtf don't they release it if its ready and exploit is in the wild, its a lot of time until 14:00 UTC and a lot of websites will be breached.
They should have shut up, released a new stealth PHP version and told everyone to update ASAP. They gave way to many details ahead allowing some AI agents to find the vulnerability within half an hour...
The update was withheld because releasing it without notifying major providers and distros would turn it into the same race, with ai having a release is the same thing as a disclosure.
This would've worked if other people were able to shut up about it. Because its existence got leaked they posted the announcement
There is no functional difference between doing just an announcement and doing an announcement with a series of builds containing the patch while withholding the source code. You do understand that right?
A message as vague as "there is a major RCE somewhere in this entire programming language" is usually pretty safe. We'll see how the details actually got out in this situation and whether the announcement caused it, but it still took a while. If you put out a patched build people will find and decompile the changes nearly instantly.
One security provider put "session.upload_progress.enabled, session.use_strict_mode" in the SEO keywords for their initial announcement, which was probably a good enough clue to feed to an LLM. https://web.archive.org/web/20261021005246/https://sansec.io... (go to page source, search for session.upload_progress). At least one person on Twitter saw this: https://x.com/its5q/status/2112700519261032497 Of course there's enough people who knew about this that the exploit vector may have leaked out to the general public through a different source as well.
Php4 -> 5 was a massive change including zendengine2 and an overhaul of many modules. Fortunately that information really doesn't tell us much. (Also it was a year of work between the first beta and the release - many changes at that time)
I mean an agent can walk those changes, but it's close to just walking all the whole source / research from scratch at that point.
Yep. It's probably one of a handful of functions. It'll be based on request input, a script doesn't have to call the function, and it works with default configuration. I bet it takes a half hour for AI to figure it out.
A patched build is strictly more information, and you'd only need to cross correlate between the two.
At this point shipping the build already may have been the best option but not necessarily everyone is actually able to ship yet. And this is of course assuming the actual vulnerability is the same one as the PoCs that are being tried, and not something even nastier instead
The reason we (used to) have responsible disclosure timelines is so that the information & software to fix vulnerabilities can be assessed, organised, written up. Builds could get built, attackers and defenders find out at once. But crucially, defenders could use the normal channels to fix their installations and be sure they'd covered themselves.
When a PoC drops before that timeline is up (like now!) the attackers get a head start because they have less work to do - just figure out how to use it to their payload, start spraying it out.
Meanwhile maintainers don't want release an incomplete or misunderstood fix. Otherwise they'd risk people updating and believing that they're safe when they're not. Even a fragment of misinformation from an official channel will spread like wildfire. So when you demand fixes NOW you're demanding something that may not be completely understood.
So (I'm sure we'll find out but) I believe this 2pm timeline was already as soon as is human possible for the PHP team to do a repsonsible job, and not risk us having to come back tomorrow for a fix to the fix.
LLMs gives attackers the advantage for a while, and it means we'll have to tighten the secrecy around even the rumour of a vulnerability.
Humans generally have the need for a process called "sleep" where people are generally required to go horizontal and unconscious for at least 6 hours per day.
No, ‘responsible disclosure’ was and always has been a response from vendors not patching their software or building secure software to start with, and trying to frame researchers as responsible for their shoddy work.
As far as I can tell, there is no proper mitigation beyond patching. Unless we count turning off your service as a mitigation. Cloudflare is currently busy playing whack-a-mole with new vectors so it’s probably not feasible to properly mitigate it on the edge either.
Improper mitigation is still better than literally nothing - a simple "this may not cover everything, but block POST at the edge might help" can go a long way.
I took my services offline last night, wouldn't have been able to sleep otherwise. There has been core PHP members that have outright said the mitigation's currently doing the rounds won't help and even cloudflare can only mitigate against known attack payloads.
The maintainer's comments are singularly unhelpful - "there's nothing you can do, just curl up and die" is pretty useless when you're faced with "take the entire company site offline" vs "maybe get exploited."
The comments aren't unhelpful, they're in fact very helpfully telling you that "take the entire company site offline" is the only safe choice right now.
So what if there are no known mitigations and it's such an open attack surface that logging doesn't help in containing it?
Since you wrote your comment the official blog posts describing what exactly is the in the exploit have been released, and "shut it all down" was definitely the right advice to give.
Yes, that's not very well done: when you are handling big IT services, you need more than "a person wrote a scary thing on twitter" to justify such an impacting action
Years ago I migrated all my personal sites to being statically generated, since they don't have actual dynamic content anyway. That was a good decision.
Same here. And for the dynamic content, I host dedicated, small services, or client side code.
Not only 10 years of no more security updates. But hosting static content is cheap, performant and sustainable. Bot literally (you can move the content anywhere, using any kind of server) and in energy sense.
While I understand it is not for everyone to write markdown files and run build commands, I strongly urge anyone with a WordPress or drupal site to give the various jamstacks, or static site builders and guis a test run.
How can I try this to see if I should shut things down myself. I run a 6 figure stealth and have a day job for fintech in 9 figures all php so kinda worried
But created my own based on it since it feels sketchy running someone else's exploit poc ya know. Ran it first in a vm before running it against a production site.
Facebook hasn't used PHP for a very long time. It's been using Hack for over 12 years, which was initially based off PHP but it's deviated quite significantly now. It's now nearly entirely statically-typed, and has a bunch of features that PHP doesn't have. IO is fully asynchronous using async/await syntax (like C# or JavaScript), functions can be marked as pure, and a bunch of other things useful in large codebases.
It still uses the same request model as PHP, since that's genuinely useful for web requests. It's easier to avoid memory leaks if each request is entirely self-contained and there's no global state persisted between requests (other than APC and opcode caches)
This link gets me a shitton of extremely intrusiv ads, some of which look like malware (auto-downloading an "OperaSetup.exe"). Is pastebin already compromised?
Meh, I'll just roll PROD back to our 4.7 image, then head down to the pub for a pint until this all blows over... Only 3 years of data will be missing... No biggie! LOL :P
The demo video has been going around Twitter today and apparently the proof of concept is privately being shared around too. The video shows pasting something in the URL and then gaining a shell on the server. It looks completely catastrophic.
I think the best course of action is to just shut your server down before the patch goes live and then bring it back after you have patched.
The URL is to show the effects of the exploit. The person's running a python script that runs the exploit and then makes the PHP installation execute an arbitrary shell command. The proof of concept involves writing "pwned" to a publicly accessible location on the web server, then they refresh the browser pointing at the URL to show it's been written.
This is gonna rinse so many LAMP WordPress installs where the PHP version is either not getting a patch or the hosting is managed by the user via a contractor or the hosting is managed by a company with a fleet of custom servers etc etc.
ha! Who knew ignoring critical updates and continuing to run deprecated software while kicking the can down the road while focusing solely on building new features would turn out to be the best security policy after all.
That was how a cluster of Java servers at a former employer avoided the Log4j vulnerability. Though I think they'd be on at least PHP 5 by now (maybe even PHP 7!), so they can't dodge two bullets.
We almost need some bot that logs in to every vulnerable PHP server and turns it off to prevent it being properly exploited before the server admin updates it..
This is probably possible, there are github repos of extensions you can build for almost every distro and php version. You could probably pre-build most and then just do a background php extension load and restart.
Paying a ransomware attack tomorrow is very much better, than not having critical medical data for the emergency right now. Of course not having a public facing medical database based on PHP, would be even better, but that might not be a decision that they are able to make right now.
Good advice if you're not using the default PHP session settings, but using default settings this means sessions can't be created. At best, that means no-one can log-in. At worst, it completely breaks the site (for those that depend on sessions even for unauthenticated users).
"How to make your site cost unlimited money and have terrible performance". People did this in the Web 1.0 days on occasion and it leads to all kinds of problems for any site with any kind of traffic.
>Or you make an exception for them.
Useless. All you need to do at that point is chain a priv-esc to your existing exploit and you get root.
Heh, but for better or for worse, a bunch of people have built businesses out of WordPress and its ecosystem. One of them is my aunt, which is why (as a designated family tech support person, though she does have a part time developer) I'm watching this thread closely!
Does she actually need WordPress/Plugin features or is it mostly about editing the site herself? would something like Publii work too? Static sites dont have CVEs and you still get a nice WYSIWYG editor so she can update the site on her own.
Did this with my parents websites and they are quite happy and I get basically no support calls (and can read threads like this one out of interest only, thankfully)
Sadly yes, it's a whole stack (built for her by a vaguely technical cofounder who has since left the business) with a bunch of business-critical plugins, including Woocommerce for handling credit card payments via Stripe and another plugin handling bookings. It's amazing for what it is but it is a bit of a nightmare to keep going.
>PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive updates from the PHP project. Some distributions and LTS vendors provide backported fixes, so contact your vendor for details, or upgrade to a supported version.
I get that maintenance teams need to have conviction in this approach, but this is definitely going to cause catastrophically large data breaches downstream.
> Given the severity of these vulnerabilities, the PHP security team provided minimal source-backports for PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 to help people building from source or without access to an LTS vendor.
None of these 2 CVEs seem relate to POC spread in twitter. I'm not sure if the POC is something fake or they just unveil something within a few hours..
Scroll down in the actual patches to the weirdness of the multipart parser. That very much looks related to the what can be abused via the upload progress callbacks that had been discussed on (anti)social media.
We observed this update ourselves and suspected it to be a mitigation when it was rolled, but I can't find any definitive record that these rules are about the PHP vulnerability. Do you have more info?
> WP Engine Security and Engineering have enabled WAF rules for all customers using GES and AN. Mitigations are currently being deployed across the rest of our infrastructure, and official patches will be applied as soon as they become available.
If the rumors for these exploits being shared on Twitter are correct this is going to be a nightmare. I wouldn't be surprised if VPS hosts step in to mitigate it somehow since so many cheap/unmaintained LAMP installs are running on those servers.
I initially updated the following php.ini setting and verified that it updated via phpinfo(). I understand this to be only a possible mitigation (see below).
session.upload_progress.enabled = Off
file_uploads = Off
According to someone stating they are one of the PHP release managers:
"INI settings alone won't protect you. You need to patch PHP."
I use Apache, and added an htaccess rewrite rule in my base directory to block all requests containing multi-part headers. Rewrite rules can also be added into Apache virtual host blocks. Accepting file uploads are not a critical function of the app in my case. This blocks multi-part form requests before they reach PHP.
I've tested the CVEs on PHP 8.5.11 and `session.upload_progress.enabled = Off` definitely increases safety but it doesn't guarantee it. Use of plugins can open up additional exposure.
If you're behind CloudFlare apparently they'll cover you, issue is, some people don't have their web servers configured to block traffic NOT from CloudFlare, so it is kind of a bandaid that's falling off I guess.
I'd check this carefully and make sure you have the WAF enabled. I seemed to always have plenty of weird looking PHP and WP requests happily forwarded by CloudFlare to my servers.
Users on the Free plan have access to the Cloudflare Free Managed Ruleset, a subset of the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset.
The only PHP project I had running I took down, it was literally just a web UI for my SQL databases on said box, which wasn't really full of anything meaningful, just old old Discord chatbot logs from forever ago, but still didnt want someone scraping those, so I removed php from the box entirely, I didnt even have a domain for the box so not super worried.
I downloaded the thing, was going to try it out to verify. But the checksum didn't match (probably just a random string generated by an LLM). I left it at that and turned off php.
I'm keeping a list [1] of all the (possible) precautions one can take, ahead of the patches appearing in a few hours. Exploits are now circulating, according to Cloudflare's CTO, so _any_ mitigation is worth investigating
I'm not seeing any discussion here about woeful web application architectures from the 1990s still in use?
The single biggest problem I came across over a decade ago when maintaining an open source PHP web application was web applications at the time typically having access to a common database server role (often also common between users and administrators) which allowed a web application process to read and sometimes write to the entire database. No use of user-specific roles in database servers and row-level-security/column-level-security authorisation. At the time I don't think PostgreSQL even had row-level-security support built into it. A runaway PHP process could return the entire database to the attacker, or change every single row of data held within the database.
The second biggest and related problem was web applications accepting files uploaded from users, or having to generate reports (maybe with external software) and save them to disk for a user to download, and not being able to ensure a runaway PHP process can't just dump all of those files or reports to an attacker. You might have been able to store the user files (or at least a decryption key for the files) in a database but then you're back to dealing with problem (1) above.
Even a decade ago it was fairly common for web application developers (of the PHP sorts too) to be well aware of the need to make their web root read-only, put the web application source code into a read-only directory outside the web root, execute interpreters such as PHP with "nobody"-like permissions, launch a new interpreter process for each connection (not multiple threads within the same process), firewall off the server the web application sits on so a runaway PHP process can't connect to internal servers, etc. Outside of an attacker messing with a database, most other aspects of PHP web applications at the time were immutable if the web application developer / system administrator had setup the environment correctly.
Is there a solution for (1) and (2) for PHP web application development that has become popular in the proceeding decade?
edit: also nominating the shared $_SESSION state of PHP that was typical a decade ago to just be left to default (e.g. all PHP processes just read/write session files to a common /tmp directory). https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-save-hand... should probably instead be used by web application developers to somehow better isolate session state between users.
As far as I can tell none of this is related to the current vulnerability in PHP itself. Even having a site that just returns echo "phone us on XXXX" is vulnerable apparently.
A dynamic language having access to all of the files it has access to is not unique to PHP. Vulnerabilities are not unique to PHP, and I doubt the Dutch National Cyber Security Center took their website offline because they lack user-specific roles in the database: https://www.ncsc.nl/index-en.html
So maybe save your elitism for a day when so many of us aren't already putting out fires? Congratulations on not being part of the 75% of the internet affected.
PHP is definitely more at risk of this class of vulnerability because fatal errors are longjmps which skip resource clean-ups. In a runtime with real unwinding, this exploit class can't exist.
> Even having a site that just returns echo "phone us on XXXX" is vulnerable apparently.
Vulnerable but perhaps with no impact. If you've setup your web server well, the vulnerable PHP process is sandboxed, at least to some degree, and an attacker executing their own code within the compromised PHP process can't move laterally through your internal networks, write files to disk, read files from disk, etc because you've locked down the PHP process.
In 2026, perhaps it's possible to:
1. Use systemd socket activation with Accept=yes [1] and strict sandboxing applied to a systemd service that executes the PHP interpreter. The result being each incoming request is dealt with inside an isolated PHP process spawned specifically to handle the request. Compromise of a PHP process doesn't impact any other concurrent requests, or any future requests, except through defined sandbox interfaces such as access to a database server socket.
2. For each user of the web application (perhaps including an 'anonymous' user too if anonymous users have access to dynamic content), if using PostgreSQL, create a role in PostgreSQL for each web application user. Then use row-level-security permissions and security barrier views within the database, and have the PHP process accept credentials from the user which are then needed to be passed through to PostgreSQL to login as that individual user.
It's not without some significant downsides:
1. It's complex and you might be the only person in the world trying to use PHP in this secure way. And if you're going this far, for a complex web application, it'd be best to split it into smaller web applications each with their own systemd service defining specific sandboxing constraints. E.g. microservice architecture where "login", "file upload", "user administration" are all separated with different sandboxing constraints applied to each.
2. Performance will suffer and you'll need more resources--for spawning new PHP processes from scratch for each request (although this is already the case with php-fpm which is most widely used), and for dealing with row-level-security in PostgreSQL (see e.g. LEAKPROOF functions).
The more common pattern I've come across on public websites in recent times that might mirror some of the above is client-side JavaScript dynamic rendering with API calls to a GraphQL database exposed on the Internet (using e.g. field-level access control). The user isolation problem is essentially pushed from PHP+PostgreSQL to a GraphQL implementation.
The question to ask is should these defaults be tightened. For example, disallow read and execution of anything outside /var/www/, such as /usr/bin/sh. For example, block syscalls PHP won't ever use to limit chance of a compromised PHP process being able to utilise a LPE kernel vulnerability. And then update user installation documentation to explain the onus is on the user to open up very restrictive default permissions should they really have a need to do so.
PHP has been the worst thing to happen to the web. It was insecure many decades ago and still is. Even CGI with C is probably more secure, never mind technologies like Java, ASP.NET and Rust with are far more secure.
I even have a preference for web stores which use ASP.NET or Java since I know my personal information are safe there.
There are probably thousands of web stores using PHP unwittingly too. I've noticed only about half of them have been taken offline.
What an awful video, not only because of the content of many PHP-running sites being exploited, but also because of the awful glitching and vignette effect, an odd dancing anime girl at the bottom and the horrendous music.
Talked to my clients this morning and persuaded most of them to shut down the services and wait for the patch. For most of them it's cheaper to lose a day of work than to pay for recovery. Scary to be in a situation where you have no fix/workaround in sight.
Kind of seems like they just shut down their PHP service like everyone else... If this is the case, hopefully they can set up a temporary static site to inform about relevant updates.
Surprising that this sort of vuln can exist for DECADES. Perhaps software really is too complex for all its behaviours to be outwardly visible. Many student-run services are down right now, even the lunch menu website is going down for maintenance.
I mean we do have examples of how to try to make actually proven and secure software (of course still not absolute), but this is simply deemed to expensive. It's basically the same for every other big problem. We do have examples how to not consume as much resources, as we do now, or how to not shoot explosives at each other. We simply do not want to do it, collectively speaking.
I got into software dev because of cyber sec, and almost everything I learned revolved around poorly implemented php, so I always stayed away from it when building
There are regular security patches for basically everything these days, including OSs. Why does this notice stand out to you? The post suggests that they're being proactive, and discovered and patched these before they were exploited. Rather they take this transparent approach, as opposed to being silent and/or doing nothing.
This one stands out because it's trivially exploited over the internet on the default configuration for all PHP versions. Most vulnerabilities require being able to run malicious code on the machine or using some rare configuration.
If the rumors going around are true this will be the worst computer security incident in history.
It's not "trivially exploitable". Two or three years ago, this would be a critical issue but require quite some expertise to exploit and exploits definitely wouldn't spread like that. LLMs are shaking the entire security industry.
It's trivially exploitable because it requires no special set up, no special credentials, no privileged access of any kind. If you can call a PHP server and you have the exploit script, you can execute arbitrary code as their `www-data` user.
Usually, attacks are at least conditional and require something that weakens security guarantees.
Yes but that means it is trivially exploitable today since anyone can get access to a LLM and where to point it towards. 2-3 years ago, things were different, that is also correct but that doesn't mean things stay frozen in time.
log4shell was easier to exploit.
It also come with an initial patch that turned out to be incomplete, so everyone had to urgently patch every java web app twice!
Log4Shell required that the attacker be able to generate a log message containing specific parameters. It was a severe exploit, but not one that worked in every Java application with the affected Log4j versions. Attackers had to find calls that logged user submitted text or query paths first. So the list of prerequisites was larger: had to be using Log4j and had to have logging of user generated text.
Still a very large attack surface, but not nearly as ubiquitous as this one.
how does Docker not yet have a new, official PHP image ready? https://hub.docker.com/_/php Nuts this wasn't ready to flip on at :00 (or even earlier given the PoC exploit and even the official PHP fixes were out well before). Now we are :20 minutes past due. Everyone had a multi-day heads up, this is negligence
If you use Nginx, you can temporarly block the subject by disallowing multipart sendings to PHP. This is quite a problem for a lot of forms, but way better that being hacked.
Here is an Nginx patch :
if ($http_content_type ~* "multipart") {
return 403;
}
You can also turn of session progress in php.ini as mentionned but that does not seem to cover every cases :
session.upload_progress.enabled = Off
Have you tested this against a POC to see if it actually mitigates? Seeing a lot of proposed mitigations but with very little detail about whether they worked or not.
It assumes PHP frees the upload progress data when it reloads the session. But PHP 8.4 (the one we use is 8.4.24, i don't know for other versions) calls Z_TRY_ADDREF(progress->data) to keep that data alive. The fake function call also seems to contain invalid fields.
This makes me question this particular PoC, not the official PHP security warning. I have not reproduced the exploit, so this is a concern based on reading the code, not proof that the real vulnerabilities cannot be exploited.
But anyway the CVE still exists, and the exploitation is tied to multipart, disabling it seems the best thing you can do now without shutting everything down.
I have tried the so-called-POC of the URL you linked, it seems it is not a full POC. I have tested it against my local PHP instances; it does not work.
For those of you using PECL as part of your image build pipeline. I'm seeing timeout issues downloading packages. PECL has been deprecated in favor of PIE. I'd recommend switching to PIE if your build relies on PECL. You don't want to run into this as you rush to update your images.
PHP as it is desperately needed the speedups in the 7 and 8 series releases to be relevant, performance loss of that magnitude is simply not going to be accepted anywhere
I help manage a few sites hosted on WPEngine, and taking them down is not an easy call to make. After making sure that our environments had the latest everything (WordPress version, PHP version, all plugins and themes on the latest), I contacted WPEngine support briefly.
They're on top of it as I would expect any major PHP hosting service to be. After asking if there was anything I could do to prep for php2shell (seemingly not), I just pleaded to be first in line when they apply patches and let them go.
How are others in similar situations handling this?
The exploits seem to rely on multipart form submissions. In a normal setup, I don’t believe PHP’s multipart parser processes GET requests.
Therefore, a temp mitigation that runs short of shutting your site down is to temporarily block POST requests until you can get the patches in place. This will screw up any form functionality, including your WP login form, but keeps your site presence up. A failed form submission is probably a better look than no site presence. You can affect this with Apache config or by using a WAF. For instance if you have cloudflare caching your domain, use a free security rule to block all POST requests until your patches are in. Something like `http.request.method in {"POST" "PUT" "PATCH" "DELETE"}`
Also, unless your server is specifically set up to only accept requests from Cloudflare, someone could likely send a request directly to your IP, so you might consider blocking multipart requests at the server level. For Nginx I added the following to all /server blocks:
if ($http_content_type ~* "multipart") { return 403; }
Luckily our service doesn't use multipart for any critical requests.
So, theoretically, if you wanted to hack a server but you don't know what OS/PHP, version they're running, you could compile a list of every delta for every litespeed release and then bruteforce it, right?
Not necessarily. Most apps should build in reproducible way these days. That means you can compile the same versions and likely get the same offsets. (+/- custom options applied to your local system)
Well, PHP has an insane number of compilation flags, so the chances of your build being the same as $GENERIC_PLATFORM's is not as high as you think.
So, if the offsets were in fact different, would the explots still work? (I think the answer is actually yes based on what I read/saw; I think the PoC dynamically calculates these offsets? Not 100% sure, but we shouldn't take chances.)
I actually looked through PHP code responsible for parsing POST request body and it's pretty bad [1].
First, there is a huge function, that is hard to read and reason about. Second, instead of proper parsing of "Content-Type" header to extract "boundary" parameter, there is just a set of substring searches which is not correct. It doesn't mean there is a vulnerability but it means PHP can read the header in a way different from a standard-compliant implementation (such as web server, WAF etc).
That rumor is false, probably because Calif, the firm that discovered the exploit also just published an OpenBSD ASLR bypass people think they must be connected.
Php2shell is completely language level. By the time the OS sees it it's just a function of the webserver.
I like PHP and I use it everyday. What concerns me about incidents like this isn't just the vuln itself, but how much access a compromised PHP process can have to the rest of the system.
Unsure what the correct response from the PHP team is here - I hope there's been plenty of work done behind the scenes to mitigate this on unpatched servers because there's not a chance defenders win the race everywhere it matters once the patches are out.
It is other way around, it was a top post, but AFAIK anti flamewar measures kick in when there are many comments compared to up votes. I mean it isn't bad heuristics when discussion already shifts in "PHP bad" direction.
PHP don't support it and likely won't patch it (even though this is probably big enough that they should), it's up to your distribution whether or not they will.
If the oauth wall is managed by PHP, then it looks like the answer is yes, you’re vulnerable to client connections that haven’t logged in.
This looks like a bug in PHP’s assembly of multipart responses & you can feed one of those to the PHP backend with a simple web request, no auth required I think.
If you put the oauth wall in front of the application before it can even reach PHP (i.e. in your nginx/caddy/apache config), then no, assuming all paths are covered.
Only 53 comments for what's most likely going to be the biggest vulnerability in history? I don't understand how this isn't getting more attention. The exploit is already out and it's basically shell access on any php website out there.
It's also very early in EU and evening/night time in part of US. The information that was out earlier was on level "make sure you update tomorrow when the patch comes out", the actual details weren't out yet.
There are some vulns that warrant a pre-release announcement (in the Drupal community, this happened for a few of the more serious fixes). And prior to the public pre-announcement, there is often informal coordination between some of the larger hosting providers or giant companies who can help roll out the patch more quickly.
The proof of concept works against any PHP server (5 and up) running in the default configuration, leading directly to RCE without authentication. The PoC out there can be defeated by disabling multi part uploads.
The PoC also requires a known binary to exploit so custom PHP builds may be safe if you're lucky, but this seems to be an extremely bad one.
Apparently, any PHP server that accepts a POST request is vulnerable to arbitrary code execution on the host (from the FPM user?) with no defense. This is DEFCON 1 of internet security: 70% of all websites are currently vulnerable until 14:00 UTC tomorrow with zero escape hatch other than blocking traffic.
What steps can someone take to determine if they might have been hit?
So far, I have checked to see if any new files have been placed in our directories or if there have been any file changes. I've also looked at the access logs for unexpected POST requests.
If your application is known to routinely "deserialize" (unsafe-eval) strings from a database or cache, an attacker might have placed a tiny backdoor that way, only to be used after the everyone has applied the PHP patches and attention levels & active staff are back to normal.
In terms of taking sites/applications down, if you have a maintenance mode that serves only HTML does that seem sufficient at the moment, or is the mere presence of PHP on a server enough right now to warrant "entire server, off button"?
The previous presence of PHP and its oftentimes ridiculous common practices might mandate a maintenance mode that is a little more involved than just serving HTML.
Many modern hosts run php in fcgi mode, where your app is a process that listens on some http port. And where the webserver is "just" a proxy and ssl termination. Shutting down the process is enough.
But traditionally, php was a module loaded into apache. Where apache not only handled ssl, http etc, but also compiled and ran php for you. With that setup, adding an html file, will keep the php runtime and app online.
God damn Claude (Opus, Fable, either) is not even helping because of their god damn shitty safeguards. Thank you, Anthropic, for letting bad guys win. I can't tell you how much I want open-weight models to work at home that can handle this type of work in the future without bullshitting about safeguards.
these safeguards are insane. codex would do some fix, them say "hm, my change has introduced a vulnerability. let me write a test for it and then do the fix" and the safeguard stops it.
That's not likely to happen. You don't even know what the exploit is.
Anyway my point is I'm much less likely to get hacked in this new era of AI assistance, as I'm only a few days behind, rathe than a few months or years behind.
> I'm much less likely to get hacked in this new era of AI assistance, as I'm only a few days behind, rathe than a few months or years behind.
Yes, but also, attackers are much faster now and complex chains of vulnerabilities became much easier to carry out. In the past, you might have just been "secure" because nobody cared to put in the time to target you unless you were unlucky. Now, many people have the capability and can completely automatize it.
We essentially had security through obscurity for a long time. It was always dangerous. It's good that it ends. But the transition might be rough.
True, it's a theory; basically a hypothesis derived from my experience with LLMs and their performance in CTFs/finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. Plausible, I believe, but I don't have any hard evidence of it happening.
Maybe the effort and required hardware of running an LLM locally have so far prevented widespread exploitation? Maybe open-weight LLMs are too far behind at the moment? Maybe it's happening but we didn't notice it for some reason?
I would strongly assume that it will happen at some point if it isn't already.
if is happening already, there would be stats to back it up. My brief 5 minutes of research suggests it is not.
in my experience AI is helping me defend against potential vulnerabilities, and so the net impact of these threats is net zero or less, even if I'm quite slow in patching stuff
> Anyway my point is I'm much less likely to get hacked in this new era of AI assistance, as I'm only a few days behind, rathe than a few months or years behind.
Your agent can't help you before the patch is rolled out, so let's not lose sight that the fix to this vulnerability will be:
apt update && apt upgrade
If you didn't know how to keep your server up to date before agents, then perhaps a managed hosting service would be a better fit?
It's going to be hilarious if I'm not vulnerable because I'm running PHP like it's 1995 via CGI and so get a brand new process per request and break ASLR infoleaks by side effect.
I'm a sysadmin that manages several servers, I realized I was vulnerable and reproduced what I found on our systems, it appears that simply disabling progress with php_admin_flag session.upload_progress.enabled Off renders the exploit inert...
This seems serious enough that I've contacted a few less-technical loved ones about it. I'm warning them of possible scams in the next days, perhaps even hosted on otherwise official pages.
A PHP core dev suggested all the mitigations getting posted are not enough and that if possible you need to shut down any PHP app until the patch comes out https://phpc.social/@Girgias/117476510850918355
I would really like a list of all major websites using PHP so I can continue to avoid ever using them again (something I already try to do). This whole situation should make it clear who was affected by their downtime in response.
I don't know if people understand that this actually lowers their reputation, instead of increasing it. Putting so important text as AI slop. Maybe it is not so important, if not worth of modifying themselves.
Yes. Bad themes have been a staple of the Internet ever since it got mainstream, remember <marquee> and <blink>. I'm used to that (although as I said the low contrast is making things extra annoying).
But I'm reading a website for getting information, not LLM fluff.
Wow, that's a terrible one. Shut down old apps (that I'd forked and upgraded to latest) I had that were PHP. Sadly, my blog was on Mediawiki and so I've got to turn that off too. Tomorrow we learn.
EDIT: Ha, Claude just took the blog and rendered all pages and now it is a static site! I'll restore the Mediawiki once I can fix the issue.
Once the dust has settled, it would be interesting to give LLMs the pre-patch source code and see whether any of them can identify this chain of vulnerabilities. Even if they can't identify the full chain, can they at least spot one of the constituent bugs and recognise its seriousness?
The original exploit, and then when the rumors of a big critical patch got out, the people who are leaking the details online probably used an LLM to find the exploit again.
Just revealing that an unpatched exploit exists in $XYZ these days basically guarantees that a bunch of people are going to target $XYZ with LLMs looking for that exploit.
I would have expected there to be a hundred entities running every single model over major code like PHP, and clang, and pretty much any behemoth open source project the world relies on. This is the sort of thing the model makers should be doing as a matter of course, as part of routine testing of their new models.
Exactly. I thought this is exactly what Anthropic's Project Glasswing was meant to be, and targeted at critical internet infrastructure.
Either Mythos is useless and didn't find this (hint: Opus 5.5 will find this once it knows where to look)... or, they did find it, and this is one of many vulnerabilities they're covering up via "guardrails".
I'll be a lot happier if I wake up tomorrow and find this was found with help from Anthropic (or even OpenAI) but I won't hold my breath.
> I would have expected there to be a hundred entities running every single model over major code like PHP, and clang, and pretty much any behemoth open source project the world relies on. This is the sort of thing the model makers should be doing as a matter of course, when they’re testing their new models.
Well, that would be super nice of them.
From a Machiavellian standpoint it may benefit the people with the most powerful models to let some serious RCEs like this PHP one get widely exploited in damaging ways to further their regulatory capture argument that open weight models have to be legally banned and only locked down models with enforced guardrails around usage can be allowed.
From a marketing standpoint, having the first model to find a bug of this magnitude and severity would be a pretty damn impressive proof of capability. Finding previously unknown, critical vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software could become a gold-standard test of frontier AI competence.
So all local universities have now essentially shut down
their web-services for students. This is ... kind of
curious because now you can not download recent updates
(e. g. new .pdf files published) from that software.
We need a long-term solution with regards to PHP. PHP
is a success story - so much web-software depends on it.
But it also has become a liability when they are all now
scared that the server can be easily taken over. This is
not acceptable, PHP.
PHP has been a security dumpster fire for decades. It's just how the entire web ecosystem works: some web designer lacking any technical know-how is asked to make a site and dumps WordPress on it out of habit.
Even though there are much more secure CMS technologies out there like Umbraco or Piranha (both ASP.NET) and web stores like NopCommerce (ASP.NET also).
There are just too many technically clueless people building web sites and web stores.
Rather than taking your site down tonight, if you have cloudflare handling your DNS, orangeclouding your domain, you can use its free security rules to just block all post requests until tomorrow rather than taking your whole site offline. Drop this into a rule: `http.request.method in {"POST" "PUT" "PATCH" "DELETE"}`
Of course you can do this with web server (eg Apache) config as well, but the CF rule is something you can do now on your phone.
I’m not saying I know this works as a mitigation, but it seems like it could at least contribute to a temporary guard until you get patch in place. Everything I’ve seen about the exploits seem to revolve around multipart form submissions.
Don’t forget to firewall your webserver so it will only accept traffic that actually went through Cloudflare. This is the most false sense of security one can get.
Haha you’re right, but the skill you need to be good with is probably eye strain tolerance. But must needs and all. :) If you don’t use a WAF of some type, the risk is probably sufficient to warrant firing up the laptop tonight or worst case use the phone.
I am seeing a lot of words like "unconditional" thrown around but I remind that defense in depth is a thing and you can practice it, or should have been practicing it. You can, for example, disable the `system` function of PHP altogether. You can also arrange for your PHP to be running in a situation where there's no shell, or any other program, to exec. Or for that matter a filesystem.
It's a RCE bug, it does not matter if you disable php functions. It's not arbitrary PHP execution, it's an exploit chain resulting in arbitrary code execution.
Indeed, an attacker theoretically can access anything the PHP process has permission to access. However even without limiting permissions (also a good idea) that means the simple/published exploits won't work on your server, and there's a high chance criminals will look for other targets, assuming you're not targeted.
Presumably this makes SELinux enabled distros like fedora are significantly less vulnerable, as the PHP process can only access files in a few contexts?
By corrupting memory and causing the CPU to jump from the intended instruction to a different one controlled by the attacker, at which point their instructions control what your process does next. Getting shell does not mean getting it to feed a spicy string to system(), it means tricking something in the process into overwriting memory with bytes that, if read as instructions, tell the CPU to make a system call to spawn a different process running arbitrary code.
You could do that to an internet-connected toaster with a JPEG. The system() function has nothing to do with it.
What is lower than what? This exploit causes the flow of control to reach zend_call_function with the argument "system". It works at the PHP level and having disabled that function is an absolute defense against the exploit.
It isn't 1998 any more and you can no longer just inject shell code on the heap.
Look, at the end of the day, every major security researcher is going "oh shit" and no amount of tweaks to your configuration is going to limit the blast radius in a way that will actually matter. You're going to need to update PHP, that's the _only_ solution to this problem.
"Shell" in security parlance is just a standin (or the standard benchmark for) for arbitrary unrestricted code execution. If you can launch a shell you can do anything the process user can.
no idea why this is downvoted. PHP runs typically on linux machines. If you depend on a language feature to prevent 'exploit' and don't utilize the operating systems features to limit access to data.
Shell access is not good, but in many places that wouldn't be the end of the world either.
If your PHP application accesses a database, you've got exfiltration, it doesn't matter in this case. Unless your PHP application is just echoing non sensitive data (i.e. rendering md files)...
<p>Due to an <a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1">upcoming significant vulnerability disclosure</a> with no official mitigation, services are currently offline as a precaution. Services will not be restored until at least later in the day on October 21. This time may also be spent on additional maintenance, so this message may be periodically unavailable.</p>
> The OpenStreetMap.org operations team have decided to temporarily shutdown a number of key secondary OSM.org services due to a critical PHP security vulnerability.
I am not affiliated with PHP in any way or sense, I am saying this as someone who is able to see PHP's announcements, and there was no patch or mitigation announced by PHP.
I don't think pulling mitigations from random users online during a developing situation is a good idea. I think shutting down ones PHP services for the time being is a very good idea if that's an option.
I applied the mitigation to all my servers when it was released, but now I've stopped all the httpds. A few hours of overnight downtime, vs potentially trying to restore everything from backups tomorrow. Everyone should weigh it up.
I don't want to jinx it but... A discussion about, of all languages out there, PHP being the one hit by that and not, say, Go or Java or Rust or Haskell etc.?
Can we discuss that at least a tiny bit?
How do people feel about running servers with PHP today?
I don't think most people that use PHP use it because they love it and find it a great technical solution, it's mostly technical debt being maintained and the fact that PHP is available to host everywhere.
I mean no language is immune to issues. Java world constantly sees fixes for both JVM and libraries. For example, besides famous log4shell, you can see still see in HTTP access log that bots are checking for vulnerable Struts versions. On the other hand, Java pushed to 100% Java (no native code) database drivers, while PHP strongly relies on c/c++ extensions, cause PHP is/was too slow.
If there is any other difference, I think it just comes to legacy PHP approach - memory management didn't matter if entire request (and forked process that handles it) was alive for maximum few seconds.
These issues tend to happen way more in languages that depend on a runtime, especially one with dynamic lookup capabilities. If I remember correctly, log4shell depended on dynamic class loading and a lot of runtime-dependent stuff. Languages that are statically-compiled and memory-safe (namely Go and Rust) don't have the runtime vector and don't generally have the memory safety vectors either. I feel a lot safer deploying services written in Go than JS, for example.
A rewrite would tackle the classic C-style W^X problems, at the expense of maintainability and focus on logic bugs and general oversights from inelegant (or lack of) design. And I'd bet PHP (and popular PHP software for reasons rooted in the language) still got plenty of the latter. You know, the "oops, that filename was client provided" kind of code execution that no amount of (un)safe blocks can help with.
A reminder, because it really needs to be said, that they spent millions of dollars in tokens for the claimed 11 day sprint, and then spent an additional 3.5 months fixing hundreds of issues it introduced before actually releasing it. Long-term maintainability remains to be seen.
Bun isn't an interpreter. It uses JavaScriptCore for that, which, you guessed it, is C++. As far as I know they have no plans of rewriting it in rust either. Your hot take doesn't seem to apply here.
Because some upstream services here in central Europe,
are closed down because of that PHP problem. So now I
am annoyed since this disrupted my workflow.
PHP, please either get your act together - or disband.
I am used to Python. Hard to switch to something else until I am forced to. I am trying to manage agentic coding at least to the point where I can identify bugs with my own eyes instead of purely believing the LLMs. I know I will cheat and let an LLM take over the entire Rust app if I tried.
NodeJS and Java are in a similar place (this CVE is a memory safety issue in PHP's C-language interpreter) but Go's compiler/runtime is written in Go and is memory-safe all the way down to the assembly.
Much of Node’s standard library is written in JavaScript, which can’t go on to exploit V8 vulnerabilities even given similar types of bugs, so I wouldn’t say it’s in a similar place. Not as familiar with Java, but I expect PHP is in a class of its own here.
I hope that people will realize that PHP is unsuited for public websites and that they need to switch to secure technologies like Java, ASP.NET or Rust.
PHP contains an almost endless stream of vulnerabilities since its inception almost 3 decades ago. Proponents claim that it's getting better but this just goes to show that nothing's changed.
Off-topic but Reddit now requires sign-in to see old.reddit. They destroyed it, "to keep us safe".
Further more, if in Australia or a few other places like Brazil, UK, France, reddit won't let you sign in at all unless you're proven to be over 16. Bottom line, linking to old.reddit is similar to linking to a paywalled article.
They degraded old.reddit even for logged in users - images show as <image>and when you click the link you are redirected to new reddit layout just to see the picture
Writers/editors really, really like Wordpress for some reason, which is like 40% of the Internet, add to that all the other Php stuff. At $DAY_JOB we have a Wordpress instance behind our VPN and use the json API to send the articles to a front-end server written in something else. Forces us to duplicate some of the front-end plugin code (and we try to not use many) but we get peace of mind in exchange.
Just as a scripting language on my own laptop, nothing prod. But one thing I notice, even coming back to it after a little while, even after using Python for everything, I find I am effortlessly productive with it.
There was an article I read recently about a blind developer who finds it easy to write in, as the "$" for the variable names makes it easier for him to identify what's going on in any given line of code.
Like any language it has advantages and disadvantages.
The "Syntax as landmarks" section sounds like he's comparing it particularly to Python. The quirk of `$` denoting a variable did kind of work out for him. Especially compared to Python where you declare a variable by assigning it. But it's not like PHP was designed with a special character for each syntax role. He still needs to use context to infer other roles.
PHP has the advantage of being preinstalled or easy to install in a lot of environments. I had to investigate the blind developer thing because I'm still on the hunt for a second advantage.
I think the ubiquiti edgerouter admin interfaces use PHP. I don’t know about mikrotik, but wouldn’t surprise me if there are a lot of those devices hanging off the internet on some nonstandard port.
I don't have a "favorite" language. I see languages and communities having strengths and weakness..I evaluate languages as being suitable or unsuitable for certain job..
If a language gets frequently get vulnerability reports, it will change my evaluation...
Php's should have been evaluated out for web applications a long time ago, if the development community was rational, but sadly its made up of far too many emotional people who takes everything personal...
But it is not clear if releasing the fix early would make the damage smaller or larger.
Having the patch probably makes creating an exploit easier. So the number of attacks would increase.
There is no way to coordinate the whole world on an earlier time. I would guess the number of people who have to patch their instances is in the hundreds of thousands.
Everybody who actively watches the topic already has the option to shut down their instances.
So ringing the bell and getting as many people as possible to shut down their webservers now and patch at 14:00 might be the best in terms of damage minimisation.
By the way, it is not enough to just "shutdown -h now" and then later restart and "apt update && apt upgrade". The moment the machine comes back, it can get hacked. So you should make sure the webserver does not start after the next boot. For Apache this would be something like "rm /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/apache2.service" and then after patching recreate the symlink via something like "ln -s /lib/systemd/system/apache2.service /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/apache2.service".
In theory. In practice, many can't just decide to shut down their service for a few hours.
WP sites like whitehouse.gov, TechCrunch, Time?
I don't see anything well known being down.
This leaked yesterday in part because so many people had advance notice.
An exploit can only "leak" if it's a private 0day used by APTs.
When warnings are sent out it has already been a public fact. Keeping some kind of dumbass embargo is just pointless theatre
Boom. A leak. It's now a public fact, so we'll instantly see people exploiting it, right? Except that without a commit or patch fixing it, or even a suggestion of a workaround, you are searching for a needle in a haystack. It could be literally anywhere, after all!
In fact, it is so well-hidden that I have not even discovered it myself yet. But its presence is a statistical certainty due to the sheer size of the codebase, so we should assume it is somewhere in there. Did I just doom every W11 user, or are perhaps embargoes at least somewhat useful?
> I feel like all "non-inner-circle people" here are taken for a laugh. OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months, decided for themselves who gets access to an early fix, and then leave the rest out to dry
Had they just kept this between themselves and the vendor this would've been effective.
Instead they selectively released it to various parties one of which promptly leaked it.
This is exactly what should have been expected
Either it's 100% silent or it's out there
How does a mobile game use PHP? Wouldn't the game code use a custom socket and protocol for its comms?
If not, you or our agent could build an exploit from the information that's already out.
It seems the published exploit can be easily prevented by filtering out multipart post requests. So people actively watching the situation can already prevent that issue by filtering those.
These two seem to do the trick, but again I am not 1000% sure until tomorrow morning's deeper dive. My eyes are burning, and I can't sleep because of the stress this exploit.
@multipart header_regexp Content-Type (?i)multipart respond @multipart 403
@uploads_php path_regexp uploads_php ^/(?:./)?wp-content/uploads/.\.php(?:/.*)?respond @uploads_php 404
Plus the php.ini changes, "session.upload_progress.enabled = Off" and strict mode. Let's hope it holds until then
https://images.chainguard.dev/directory/image/php/versions
I think that this made sense a few years ago but in today's world it is so feasible to give an LLM a hint and throw some cash at it to find an exploit that I don't think this calculus makes sense anymore.
No matter the excuse, the security issue must be fixed. Anyone trying to delay this is not acting in good faith. I understand your rationale but that does not excuse you from being labelled as such too.
We should live in the age of open source AT ALL TIMES. No exceptions, for anyone, no matter the reasons. And that includes those who want to withhold code or patches.
A lot of people are going to do the math on migrating. Bugs happen everywhere. Leaving the community out in the cold and only supplying the corporate sponsors doesn't.
https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-21-5
RCE via OOM corruption - https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-w8hw...
RCE via stale global state - https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-6wmf...
Still waiting on container updates and package updates. Not a peep from cpanel or plesk. What a mess
It seems to have a few more technical details.
There are so many keeping old php versions alive for compatibility with whatever software
There's a lot of zombie software on the net that is ripe for the picking. More food for the botnet.
Wordpress in particular is a stupidly simple vector.
I can't think of a faster way to clear out the vulnerable surface area.
If only there was a way to trivially rewrite just about any software
(I just ran an "emerge --sync" but the mirror that was used does not have yet the updates)
https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-109618
Docker hub shows the new tags but the manifests are missing https://hub.docker.com/_/php
[dead] ?
What does that even mean?
Shit, some people on HN sure don't want any timely mitigations to be available.
Doesn't really feel like it's a good way to handle security to me.
This is MIT open source, run it through your own LLM. If you find a bug, submit a fix.
If you're paranoid, launch it as a Linux user with no access to any files. It's just supposed to proxy some network requests.
Shut down the affected services until they can install the patch. This issue is widespread enough that users will understand. Many government etc sites are affected too.
I'm sure you have the best intentions. I still think anyone trying to fix a massive security hole by running random 10 minute old code from Github isn't really being smart about it.
Seriously though. I don’t know what’s best. Taking everything down or not.. I just run a small time SaaS.
And the work to clean up if you get compromised is massive.
Edit: Or maybe not? At least one service on their IT-department's list seems to be working again. :-)
There are a handful people responsible for doing a release. They are still asleep.
To be honest, I am also shocked, that the exploit was published that quickly, after the leaked video (which was the reason, why the announcement happened in the first place, at that specific time). We expected a bit more time, even with LLMs...
The vulnerability and patch are both very complex, and the maintainers did an incredible job on this one. We tested the patch extensively and it's holding up well.
We've made these images free and will keep them that way.
"We took our website down this morning when the "PoC"s were released, only serving a static website. Our customers were not pleased. Then we got contacted by Chainguard affiliates using our public support form if we would like to schedule a meeting with them, so that they could sell us their security services."
If the first party to receive this information says, "Wow, of course I must act on this, because customers are on the line," then it makes sense to simply choose who you tell more carefully or not at all.
If you want to 'adopt' a new reality, you talk to all parties, and everyone moves up the release. That's how agreements and trust work. If you don't do so? No one will trust you ever again.
And?
You won't be at the table next time.
I don't know many who want to deal with untrustworthy people.
are we to somehow count the hypothetical future exploitees that may yet be helped by avoiding disclosure 1–1 against the actual literal current exploitees harmed by further postponing the fixes landing?
If you want your customers to believe they won't be hung out to dry when the broader community patches before they can because you're no longer in the loop, you cooperate.
It's not like this is the last 0-day that will need to get patched and deployed in a hurry. "Not slower to patch than virtually anyone else" is a pretty sustainable place to be.
Why would you implicitly take them at their word?
as it stands though, what i replied to wasn't a useful addition to the discussion. it could easily become so by either being made contingent upon the possibility of that being a lie, or being bundled with an assertion like yours that chainguard is not to be taken at their word. doing neither and simply responding as if a causally opposite statement had been made is just a non sequitur.
Even then, it implies more than it says. It's often used to suggest the exploit came from a remote system one does not directly control and was deployed, successfully, against another system one does not directly control. But even that does not necessarily have to be true, as people can use it, without any bad faith and not trying to twist the phrase, in cases where only one of those conditions hold, e.g. against a system one does directly control where the exploit attempt was unsuccessful.
Breaching an embargo, makes reverse engineering easier. We don't need to analyse motives or pontificate. Disrupting the supply chain... Disrupts the supply chain.
anything that narrows the searchspace
What they have achieved by delaying the patch is that exploits are now available publicly before a patch.
Surely this is the worse outcome.
Also not announce it beforehand…
This is something of a fallacy. "The Industry" cannot learn.
But laws and regulations can require better security.
As in the history of seatbelts in vehicles, tech tool stacks are insecure by design and no one is ever really held accountable... until the cost is deemed too high.
It's evident that we have not reached that limit yet.
That's horribly naive with an installed base this size and if you are that geographically dependent then I would hope to read how this will be dealt with going forward.
I think you are assuming I am running PHP which I haven't used in production for more than a decade. That doesn't change the fact that if you power this many websites that you should have a plan in place for when there is a critical issue.
German article: https://www.heise.de/news/WTF-Polizei-rueckte-Samstagnacht-w...
Beats panicked boss banging on the door. If there’s one thing I cannot handle while doing something critical in production, it’s panicked boss in the same room as me.
In those cases I'd rather the boss pounding at the door at least I could call the police and have them removed.
I agree with GP that my first instinct would be "lawyer", but I'm imagining the police at the door saying something like "hey we're here to inform you there's an urgent xyz, we'll now be on our way" and leaving. At that point that's the police matter resolved, no?
The upgrade instructions here should include torching your hosts and starting again.
We don't really need it anymore now that we have LLMs.
I don't have a problem with it.
govulncheck tells me if my codebase is actually affected by CVEs or not. So if there's 50 CVE'd modules but my codebase doesn't use them, I sleep.
Secondly, the fix is almost always "go get -u <affected module>", and because it's a CVE, it's usually just a bugfix release and still completely compatible with how I'm using it... but I run the test suite to be more certain.
PHP still powers approximately 70% of websites
Nobody needs to write any of this code anymore.
Rust is literally the best positioned language to handle the upcoming onslaught of CVEs.
Rust is also a language with no real stdlib, and so you have to import crates for everything including the kitchen sink.
Which opens you up to the very real risk of supply chain vulnerabilities unless you make an active effort to code review your imports and keep the length of your import list under control.[1][2][3]
Rust supporters also need to urgently realise that memory safe != secure. It is very much possible to have vulnerabilities in memory safe code.
This has been demonstrated by Cloudflare[4] and countless others.
Age-old vulnerability classes such as input validation, error handling and many others are still very much possible in a Rust codebase.
So please. Yes, I'm sure Rust is a fantastic memory-safe language. But do not portray it as being magically immune from CVEs.
[1] https://kerkour.com/rust-supply-chain-nightmare
[2] https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/119/sudo-rs-depencencies-when-...
[3] https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/104/dealing-with-dependencies-...
[4] https://hackaday.com/2025/11/20/how-one-uncaught-rust-except...
Well-architected solutions would have the static part broken out so only the dynamic content is on a separate domain/host and that part can be secured as needed. Then something like this only turns off your forms/upload dialogs.
In contrast (I know this is apples to oranges), Python’s stdlib is incredibly broad. colorsys lets you convert between color spaces. plistlib lets you read and write Apple’s property list files. graphlib has a topological sorter, which can lead to hilariously short interview questions when the interviewer isn’t familiar with Python’s stdlib.
I'm not rising to that bait. I'm sure you know perfectly well what I mean.
So let's just be polite, cordial and leave that topic there there. I'm sure you know its a topic that attracts 'strong views', particularly from the Rust side, which is no doubt why you're trying to engage on it.
The only times I had to use third party packages for basic stuff, was when developing embedded software on limited hardware.
Do you mean that for async we need third party runtimes like tokyo? Or that types and utilities that many other languages ship by default in stdlib, like http aren't in rusts?
I'm sorry for the tone of my post. It was meant as honest surprise, but I clearly see now how it sounds baity and provoking.
https://github.com/casey/just/blob/master/Cargo.lock
And the helix editor
https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/blob/master/Cargo.lock
Compare them to the dependencies of gnu make (pretty sure it’s only posix)
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/m...
And vim
https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/blob/master/c...
###
Downloading the internet to build a smallish software is always bad in my opinion.
1) It is now much easier to work in a language with better security features such as Rust. Previously, there definitely was some kind of trade-off between accessibility, performance, and security, and some people argue that this is over. I don't know if this is true, but it seems plausible.
2) You can now translate your legacy projects to a different language much more easily. This is definitely true, but that doesn't mean it doesn't introduce new/other problems or that it is easy enough (again, I simply don't know).
If you don't understand the language(eg, not easy to work with), don't work professionally in it. All LLM work need audit, a second set of eyes, just as work from a coworker needs peer review prior to sign off.
How can one peer review an LLM without full, experienced knowledge?
- Any PHP site you ever put your email/password/personal data in being hacked over the next few hours (especially things like forums).
- As a result of the above, a massive wave of phishing attempts.
- Corporates/Admins panicking and turning off services as a precautionary measure over the next hours or days.
What else do you expect them to do? Pray?
Switching something off is far preferably over being hacked.
https://x.com/MagicalTux/status/2112725774025572431 https://x.com/rina4_tot/status/2112723421641531772
I think this exploit + agentic AI (which allows for rapid secret exfiltration/utilization) may be a potent enough combo to trigger a sort of Kessler Syndrome for network security.
And he went to prison for a few years for it. So he knows something about PHP exploits.
why it would be a thing, beyond "serious problem"?
lol no.
I feel old. Heartbleed was 2014.
Extremely legacy software wasn't affected either (log4j v1 or apache commons-logging!). Lots of automated scanners flagging the idle jar as well (when the app used Logback for example as the SLF4J implementer, but the scanner saw a transitive for the log4j jar and would scream at you - that's when I stopped caring about github vuln scans btw, it was a shitshow).
Like dont get me wrong, it was a bad vuln, but to me it seems like it was more hype machine and internet screaming than actual vulnerable applications. I do recall Minecraft was vulnerable though, that one was indeed a big target given publicly exposed servers and such.
Measuring “worst” is hard.
Thanks, PHP.
Yeah no.
This is bad but doesn't even crack the top ten.
At the end of the day, nobody gives a shit if another WordPress blog gets hacked.
https://x.com/dok2001/status/2112811965735202970
When will they finally release the patch?!
This would've worked if other people were able to shut up about it. Because its existence got leaked they posted the announcement
This lets an AI agent look at the changes made from PHP 4 to PHP 5 and it also lets the agent guess what type of vulnerability it must be.
I mean an agent can walk those changes, but it's close to just walking all the whole source / research from scratch at that point.
At this point shipping the build already may have been the best option but not necessarily everyone is actually able to ship yet. And this is of course assuming the actual vulnerability is the same one as the PoCs that are being tried, and not something even nastier instead
When a PoC drops before that timeline is up (like now!) the attackers get a head start because they have less work to do - just figure out how to use it to their payload, start spraying it out.
Meanwhile maintainers don't want release an incomplete or misunderstood fix. Otherwise they'd risk people updating and believing that they're safe when they're not. Even a fragment of misinformation from an official channel will spread like wildfire. So when you demand fixes NOW you're demanding something that may not be completely understood.
So (I'm sure we'll find out but) I believe this 2pm timeline was already as soon as is human possible for the PHP team to do a repsonsible job, and not risk us having to come back tomorrow for a fix to the fix.
LLMs gives attackers the advantage for a while, and it means we'll have to tighten the secrecy around even the rumour of a vulnerability.
> I believe this 2pm timeline was already as soon as is human possible for the PHP team to do a repsonsible job
I'll be surprised and kind of upset if the fix wasn't already done when they announced the bug and the sub-24-hour release time.
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117477870253346830
Can’t find any reliable information on what to do prior to the patch, seen some info that turning off session progress does not mitigate.
Anyway.. back to calling everyone
"X may mitigate some of the active attacks" is helpful - you can evaluate if X impacts you, and make a choice.
"Y is how we're seeing the attacks" is helpful - you can setup logging to see if you're being exploited.
"Z reduces but we can't say it eliminates the risk" is similar.
"SHUT IT ALL DOWN" doesn't do much but make good noise and increase the chance that the next one is considered to be a "boy-crying-wolf" scenario.
(Of course, taking all dev/test/unimportant sites down for a few hours is painless, but Wordpress/PHP runs some of the biggest sites in the world.)
Since you wrote your comment the official blog posts describing what exactly is the in the exploit have been released, and "shut it all down" was definitely the right advice to give.
After all this is done, CERT-EU isn't going to write the defense of your actions for you.
Not only 10 years of no more security updates. But hosting static content is cheap, performant and sustainable. Bot literally (you can move the content anywhere, using any kind of server) and in energy sense.
While I understand it is not for everyone to write markdown files and run build commands, I strongly urge anyone with a WordPress or drupal site to give the various jamstacks, or static site builders and guis a test run.
But created my own based on it since it feels sketchy running someone else's exploit poc ya know. Ran it first in a vm before running it against a production site.
https://x.com/levelsio
It still uses the same request model as PHP, since that's genuinely useful for web requests. It's easier to avoid memory leaks if each request is entirely self-contained and there's no global state persisted between requests (other than APC and opcode caches)
it now serves ads that instantly start those downloads its been like that for a couple of weeks
I think the best course of action is to just shut your server down before the patch goes live and then bring it back after you have patched.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/benevolent_wo...
Turning it off may cause deaths. Letting it get ransomwared may cause more. Do you pull the lever to turn it off?
You make sure www-data CANNOT write ANYWHERE on disk. Not /tmp/ Not to /var/www/. No where.
Then make sure your sudoers has nothing weird in it.
Finally disable www-data's ability to run basically anything that isn't required for the operation of your httpd or php-fpm et al.
You then harden it further and further until an RCE does not matter because it's incapable of doing anything.
tldr always treat httpd as untrusted.
Also: https://stopdisablingselinux.com/ - SELinux can mitigate this.
"How to make your site cost unlimited money and have terrible performance". People did this in the Web 1.0 days on occasion and it leads to all kinds of problems for any site with any kind of traffic.
>Or you make an exception for them.
Useless. All you need to do at that point is chain a priv-esc to your existing exploit and you get root.
Did this with my parents websites and they are quite happy and I get basically no support calls (and can read threads like this one out of interest only, thankfully)
And also relies on the target being patched against any Linux EoP...
I get that maintenance teams need to have conviction in this approach, but this is definitely going to cause catastrophically large data breaches downstream.
> Given the severity of these vulnerabilities, the PHP security team provided minimal source-backports for PHP 7.4, PHP 8.0, and PHP 8.1 to help people building from source or without access to an LTS vendor.
https://www.php.net/downloads.php?source=Y
It's really up.
The Alpine GitLab[1] indicates the PHP versions to be released 21-10-2026 14:00:00 UTC are:
8.5.12 8.4.27 8.3.36 8.2.35
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/change-log/changelog/
[1] https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/groups/alpine/-/work_items?sh...
https://x.com/BunnyCDN/status/2112867273333485634
> WP Engine Security and Engineering have enabled WAF rules for all customers using GES and AN. Mitigations are currently being deployed across the rest of our infrastructure, and official patches will be applied as soon as they become available.
I initially updated the following php.ini setting and verified that it updated via phpinfo(). I understand this to be only a possible mitigation (see below).
According to someone stating they are one of the PHP release managers: https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1xb2utu/comment/phyu5m...I use Apache, and added an htaccess rewrite rule in my base directory to block all requests containing multi-part headers. Rewrite rules can also be added into Apache virtual host blocks. Accepting file uploads are not a critical function of the app in my case. This blocks multi-part form requests before they reach PHP.
And verified the non-block vs. block case. https://freeimage.host/i/nOqumyNI'm continuing to learn about the situation and may take the server offline as I learn more.
The writeup I found here:
https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html
Content from a couple of my ChatGPT 6 Pro sessions about the issue:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ad89ea3-b2f0-83ea-9c4c-2ecf5cc24b...
https://chatgpt.com/share/6ad8ad3d-3f6c-83e9-abf0-41da8a0d65...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP2ShellAdd this to nginx.conf (or drop as a text file into /etc/nginx/conf.d/) :
Then in every 'location /' block for every hosted server: Then restart nginx.Users on the Free plan have access to the Cloudflare Free Managed Ruleset, a subset of the Cloudflare Managed Ruleset.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/get-started/
Everything else I use is not on PHP.
They can't cover you. Only proper fix is updating your server.
This suggests they might not have been exploits related to the CVE in question, so what you did might not be enough, be careful.
1. Turn off session upload progress
2. Block multipart requests at the web server
More info: https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/cve-2026-109618-and-cve-20...
is this multipart request smuggling again?
https://ma.ttias.be/php-cve-2026-109618-early-mitigation/
> Both block automated requests, so I could not check their text myself.
Are you automated?
The single biggest problem I came across over a decade ago when maintaining an open source PHP web application was web applications at the time typically having access to a common database server role (often also common between users and administrators) which allowed a web application process to read and sometimes write to the entire database. No use of user-specific roles in database servers and row-level-security/column-level-security authorisation. At the time I don't think PostgreSQL even had row-level-security support built into it. A runaway PHP process could return the entire database to the attacker, or change every single row of data held within the database.
The second biggest and related problem was web applications accepting files uploaded from users, or having to generate reports (maybe with external software) and save them to disk for a user to download, and not being able to ensure a runaway PHP process can't just dump all of those files or reports to an attacker. You might have been able to store the user files (or at least a decryption key for the files) in a database but then you're back to dealing with problem (1) above.
Even a decade ago it was fairly common for web application developers (of the PHP sorts too) to be well aware of the need to make their web root read-only, put the web application source code into a read-only directory outside the web root, execute interpreters such as PHP with "nobody"-like permissions, launch a new interpreter process for each connection (not multiple threads within the same process), firewall off the server the web application sits on so a runaway PHP process can't connect to internal servers, etc. Outside of an attacker messing with a database, most other aspects of PHP web applications at the time were immutable if the web application developer / system administrator had setup the environment correctly.
Is there a solution for (1) and (2) for PHP web application development that has become popular in the proceeding decade?
edit: also nominating the shared $_SESSION state of PHP that was typical a decade ago to just be left to default (e.g. all PHP processes just read/write session files to a common /tmp directory). https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.session-set-save-hand... should probably instead be used by web application developers to somehow better isolate session state between users.
A dynamic language having access to all of the files it has access to is not unique to PHP. Vulnerabilities are not unique to PHP, and I doubt the Dutch National Cyber Security Center took their website offline because they lack user-specific roles in the database: https://www.ncsc.nl/index-en.html
So maybe save your elitism for a day when so many of us aren't already putting out fires? Congratulations on not being part of the 75% of the internet affected.
Vulnerable but perhaps with no impact. If you've setup your web server well, the vulnerable PHP process is sandboxed, at least to some degree, and an attacker executing their own code within the compromised PHP process can't move laterally through your internal networks, write files to disk, read files from disk, etc because you've locked down the PHP process.
In 2026, perhaps it's possible to:
1. Use systemd socket activation with Accept=yes [1] and strict sandboxing applied to a systemd service that executes the PHP interpreter. The result being each incoming request is dealt with inside an isolated PHP process spawned specifically to handle the request. Compromise of a PHP process doesn't impact any other concurrent requests, or any future requests, except through defined sandbox interfaces such as access to a database server socket.
2. For each user of the web application (perhaps including an 'anonymous' user too if anonymous users have access to dynamic content), if using PostgreSQL, create a role in PostgreSQL for each web application user. Then use row-level-security permissions and security barrier views within the database, and have the PHP process accept credentials from the user which are then needed to be passed through to PostgreSQL to login as that individual user.
It's not without some significant downsides:
1. It's complex and you might be the only person in the world trying to use PHP in this secure way. And if you're going this far, for a complex web application, it'd be best to split it into smaller web applications each with their own systemd service defining specific sandboxing constraints. E.g. microservice architecture where "login", "file upload", "user administration" are all separated with different sandboxing constraints applied to each.
2. Performance will suffer and you'll need more resources--for spawning new PHP processes from scratch for each request (although this is already the case with php-fpm which is most widely used), and for dealing with row-level-security in PostgreSQL (see e.g. LEAKPROOF functions).
The more common pattern I've come across on public websites in recent times that might mirror some of the above is client-side JavaScript dynamic rendering with API calls to a GraphQL database exposed on the Internet (using e.g. field-level access control). The user isolation problem is essentially pushed from PHP+PostgreSQL to a GraphQL implementation.
[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
The question to ask is should these defaults be tightened. For example, disallow read and execution of anything outside /var/www/, such as /usr/bin/sh. For example, block syscalls PHP won't ever use to limit chance of a compromised PHP process being able to utilise a LPE kernel vulnerability. And then update user installation documentation to explain the onus is on the user to open up very restrictive default permissions should they really have a need to do so.
[1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
The one gripe I'll have is that rowlevel security is slow and messy to use. If a design allows skipping it, it should be skipped.
I even have a preference for web stores which use ASP.NET or Java since I know my personal information are safe there.
There are probably thousands of web stores using PHP unwittingly too. I've noticed only about half of them have been taken offline.
https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/
I got into software dev because of cyber sec, and almost everything I learned revolved around poorly implemented php, so I always stayed away from it when building
but this time it's php directly? that's scary
If the rumors going around are true this will be the worst computer security incident in history.
Usually, attacks are at least conditional and require something that weakens security guarantees.
log4shell was easier to exploit. It also come with an initial patch that turned out to be incomplete, so everyone had to urgently patch every java web app twice!
Still a very large attack surface, but not nearly as ubiquitous as this one.
Here is an Nginx patch : if ($http_content_type ~* "multipart") { return 403; }
You can also turn of session progress in php.ini as mentionned but that does not seem to cover every cases : session.upload_progress.enabled = Off
It assumes PHP frees the upload progress data when it reloads the session. But PHP 8.4 (the one we use is 8.4.24, i don't know for other versions) calls Z_TRY_ADDREF(progress->data) to keep that data alive. The fake function call also seems to contain invalid fields.
This makes me question this particular PoC, not the official PHP security warning. I have not reproduced the exploit, so this is a concern based on reading the code, not proof that the real vulnerabilities cannot be exploited.
But anyway the CVE still exists, and the exploitation is tied to multipart, disabling it seems the best thing you can do now without shutting everything down.
Fil-C should have caught this right? I wonder if it would benefit the PHP ecosystem as a whole if the releases are built with it instead.
They're on top of it as I would expect any major PHP hosting service to be. After asking if there was anything I could do to prep for php2shell (seemingly not), I just pleaded to be first in line when they apply patches and let them go.
How are others in similar situations handling this?
Therefore, a temp mitigation that runs short of shutting your site down is to temporarily block POST requests until you can get the patches in place. This will screw up any form functionality, including your WP login form, but keeps your site presence up. A failed form submission is probably a better look than no site presence. You can affect this with Apache config or by using a WAF. For instance if you have cloudflare caching your domain, use a free security rule to block all POST requests until your patches are in. Something like `http.request.method in {"POST" "PUT" "PATCH" "DELETE"}`
So, theoretically, if you wanted to hack a server but you don't know what OS/PHP, version they're running, you could compile a list of every delta for every litespeed release and then bruteforce it, right?
So, if the offsets were in fact different, would the explots still work? (I think the answer is actually yes based on what I read/saw; I think the PoC dynamically calculates these offsets? Not 100% sure, but we shouldn't take chances.)
First, there is a huge function, that is hard to read and reason about. Second, instead of proper parsing of "Content-Type" header to extract "boundary" parameter, there is just a set of substring searches which is not correct. It doesn't mean there is a vulnerability but it means PHP can read the header in a way different from a standard-compliant implementation (such as web server, WAF etc).
[1] https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/main/rfc1867.c#L7...
Someone on X mentioned the bug relies on some kind of ASLR bypass.
Php2shell is completely language level. By the time the OS sees it it's just a function of the webserver.
I had to shut down my own backend services. Luckily a big part of my service can run on a static website.
This looks like one of those things.
This looks like a bug in PHP’s assembly of multipart responses & you can feed one of those to the PHP backend with a simple web request, no auth required I think.
If you put the oauth wall in front of the application before it can even reach PHP (i.e. in your nginx/caddy/apache config), then no, assuming all paths are covered.
https://gist.github.com/SourceCodeplz/82f07c94ca7aa036875622...
https://fedi.katze.sh/@elise/117479383739450605
The PoC also requires a known binary to exploit so custom PHP builds may be safe if you're lucky, but this seems to be an extremely bad one.
So far, I have checked to see if any new files have been placed in our directories or if there have been any file changes. I've also looked at the access logs for unexpected POST requests.
Are there any other steps?
e.g. if your site usually responds blank for https://site.example/database-passwords-and-other-goodies.ph... but under maintenance mode publishes the configuration verbatim, that would be quickly picked up the usual scanner bots.
Many modern hosts run php in fcgi mode, where your app is a process that listens on some http port. And where the webserver is "just" a proxy and ssl termination. Shutting down the process is enough.
But traditionally, php was a module loaded into apache. Where apache not only handled ssl, http etc, but also compiled and ran php for you. With that setup, adding an html file, will keep the php runtime and app online.
[original: The Release Candidate for the patched version is out!]
https://hub.docker.com/_/php/tags?name=8.5
8.5.12RC1 is a planned RC, see: https://discourse.thephp.foundation/t/php-php-8-5-12rc1-avai...
so even if it takes a few days to get my AI agent to do this, it's still a vastly more secure landscape for an amatuer like me
Anyway my point is I'm much less likely to get hacked in this new era of AI assistance, as I'm only a few days behind, rathe than a few months or years behind.
Yes, but also, attackers are much faster now and complex chains of vulnerabilities became much easier to carry out. In the past, you might have just been "secure" because nobody cared to put in the time to target you unless you were unlucky. Now, many people have the capability and can completely automatize it.
We essentially had security through obscurity for a long time. It was always dangerous. It's good that it ends. But the transition might be rough.
I'm not seeing reports of dramatic increase in hacks.
It will be interesting test case today, will we see huge amounts of hacks or not.
Maybe the effort and required hardware of running an LLM locally have so far prevented widespread exploitation? Maybe open-weight LLMs are too far behind at the moment? Maybe it's happening but we didn't notice it for some reason?
I would strongly assume that it will happen at some point if it isn't already.
in my experience AI is helping me defend against potential vulnerabilities, and so the net impact of these threats is net zero or less, even if I'm quite slow in patching stuff
Security researchers expect mass attacks within 15 minutes of disclosure.
Your agent can't help you before the patch is rolled out, so let's not lose sight that the fix to this vulnerability will be:
apt update && apt upgrade
If you didn't know how to keep your server up to date before agents, then perhaps a managed hosting service would be a better fit?
Expect the entire ipv4 space to be crawled for this with common paths being attempted.
The AI assistance you need is "rewrite this in something else"
I wonder if this is the new norm for LLM era...
https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2026...
> affect PHP versions 5, 6, 7, and 8.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/php-warns-adm... (which references HN as a source - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167754)
Probably the same way log4j 1.x avoided log4shell: the vulnerable code was introduced on a later release.
B: "5.6, 7, 8“
A: fixes a "typo" ok so "5, 6, 7, 8"
> Two cached bucket pointers, one freed tree.
I've rarely been happier than now to have left IT for good...
You immediately know you're likely to get clear, technical, actionable info instead of some corporate bullshit
Not so with LLM usage
But I'm reading a website for getting information, not LLM fluff.
EDIT: Ha, Claude just took the blog and rendered all pages and now it is a static site! I'll restore the Mediawiki once I can fix the issue.
If they can't, why not?
If they can, why haven't they already?
If you only tell them to find issues in PHP - the strongest models probably still can, although they might find different issues ;)
The original exploit, and then when the rumors of a big critical patch got out, the people who are leaking the details online probably used an LLM to find the exploit again.
Just revealing that an unpatched exploit exists in $XYZ these days basically guarantees that a bunch of people are going to target $XYZ with LLMs looking for that exploit.
Either Mythos is useless and didn't find this (hint: Opus 5.5 will find this once it knows where to look)... or, they did find it, and this is one of many vulnerabilities they're covering up via "guardrails".
I'll be a lot happier if I wake up tomorrow and find this was found with help from Anthropic (or even OpenAI) but I won't hold my breath.
Well, that would be super nice of them.
From a Machiavellian standpoint it may benefit the people with the most powerful models to let some serious RCEs like this PHP one get widely exploited in damaging ways to further their regulatory capture argument that open weight models have to be legally banned and only locked down models with enforced guardrails around usage can be allowed.
From a marketing standpoint, having the first model to find a bug of this magnitude and severity would be a pretty damn impressive proof of capability. Finding previously unknown, critical vulnerabilities in widely used open-source software could become a gold-standard test of frontier AI competence.
The bad guys have invested the resources of the criminal enterprise into hardware running unrestricted models.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836
Anyone have an archive link?
We need a long-term solution with regards to PHP. PHP is a success story - so much web-software depends on it. But it also has become a liability when they are all now scared that the server can be easily taken over. This is not acceptable, PHP.
Even though there are much more secure CMS technologies out there like Umbraco or Piranha (both ASP.NET) and web stores like NopCommerce (ASP.NET also).
There are just too many technically clueless people building web sites and web stores.
Of course you can do this with web server (eg Apache) config as well, but the CF rule is something you can do now on your phone.
I’m not saying I know this works as a mitigation, but it seems like it could at least contribute to a temporary guard until you get patch in place. Everything I’ve seen about the exploits seem to revolve around multipart form submissions.
You could do that to an internet-connected toaster with a JPEG. The system() function has nothing to do with it.
It isn't 1998 any more and you can no longer just inject shell code on the heap.
Shell access is not good, but in many places that wouldn't be the end of the world either.
Rethink your strategy
<p>Due to an <a href="https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1">upcoming significant vulnerability disclosure</a> with no official mitigation, services are currently offline as a precaution. Services will not be restored until at least later in the day on October 21. This time may also be spent on additional maintenance, so this message may be periodically unavailable.</p>
> The OpenStreetMap.org operations team have decided to temporarily shutdown a number of key secondary OSM.org services due to a critical PHP security vulnerability.
php.ini:
https://phpc.social/@Girgias/117476477429221001
Are you speaking officially here?
There are various mitigations suggested online, including completely blocking multipart requests at LB level. Is the combination of both effective?
I don't think pulling mitigations from random users online during a developing situation is a good idea. I think shutting down ones PHP services for the time being is a very good idea if that's an option.
I shut down my servers five hours ago. This might have seemed premature at the time.
I think the best course of advice for most people is to shut down their servers as soon as they possibly can.
Can we discuss that at least a tiny bit?
How do people feel about running servers with PHP today?
With vibe coded slop tools readily available, using php in 2026 is just laziness.
At least this time we can have LLMs rediscover it and make patches ourselves.
Here is the patch I had an LLM come up with against master: https://pastebin.com/raw/EUCF0SR0 It at least stops the PoC which is better than nothing.
Why?
Because some upstream services here in central Europe, are closed down because of that PHP problem. So now I am annoyed since this disrupted my workflow.
PHP, please either get your act together - or disband.
I think this one more great example what kind of a liability and ticking time-bomb memory-unsafe code is.
If not I suggest PHenomenalPhail.
https://nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerability/october-2026-securi...
No excuse whatsoever to not either rewrite your website of PHP or to rewrite PHP itself to Rust.
PHP contains an almost endless stream of vulnerabilities since its inception almost 3 decades ago. Proponents claim that it's getting better but this just goes to show that nothing's changed.
https://xitter.cf/k_firsov/status/2112718728232329240#m
https://phpc.social/@Girgias/117476510850918355
https://old.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1xb2utu/comment/phyu5m...
Further more, if in Australia or a few other places like Brazil, UK, France, reddit won't let you sign in at all unless you're proven to be over 16. Bottom line, linking to old.reddit is similar to linking to a paywalled article.
I know there must be a ton of random sites which makes this a huge deal.
But, does it affect any big players? I think php is big at Meta but I would imagine its so heavily customized it might be safe from this.
[0] https://modat.io/blog/php-exposure-before-the-21-oct-2026-se...
Just as a scripting language on my own laptop, nothing prod. But one thing I notice, even coming back to it after a little while, even after using Python for everything, I find I am effortlessly productive with it.
There was an article I read recently about a blind developer who finds it easy to write in, as the "$" for the variable names makes it easier for him to identify what's going on in any given line of code.
Like any language it has advantages and disadvantages.
The "Syntax as landmarks" section sounds like he's comparing it particularly to Python. The quirk of `$` denoting a variable did kind of work out for him. Especially compared to Python where you declare a variable by assigning it. But it's not like PHP was designed with a special character for each syntax role. He still needs to use context to infer other roles.
PHP has the advantage of being preinstalled or easy to install in a lot of environments. I had to investigate the blind developer thing because I'm still on the hunt for a second advantage.
If a language gets frequently get vulnerability reports, it will change my evaluation...
Php's should have been evaluated out for web applications a long time ago, if the development community was rational, but sadly its made up of far too many emotional people who takes everything personal...