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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
The police should wake them up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just shut down our MediaWiki site temporarily out of an abundance of caution. The twitter videos look scary...
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.
https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944
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.
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..
Kindware instead of malware. Just goes around finding vulnerabilities and using them to patch things and improve security everywhere.
Benevolent worms.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/benevolent_wo...
Heheh that's cute.
I’ve thought about doing this in the past but have no trust in police to see it as a Good Samaritan act
This might be the nail in the coffin for php.
This is a joke, right? I can't tell if this is a joke.
Don’t you mean WWZ ? Php is hardly dead – billions of installs.
That is definitely very not good.
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
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.
Uh oh, POC is already out there https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html
They need to release it now.
There is allegedly a temporary mitigation: https://twitter.com/k_firsov/status/2112718728232329240
php.ini:
Just a heads up, as of my comment, this is not endorsed by PHP as a migration for the patch.
> as of my comment, this is not endorsed by PHP
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 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 wouldn't skip updating, but is there anything else we can do, other than simply shutting down the web server until the fix is available?
I do not have details about any mitigation. There are rumors that people have independently come across php2shell exploits.
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.
You could disconnect the web server from the internet!
A lot of people are going to be up late on account of this.
Must be a pretty serious one that can be exploited easily, I haven’t seen this type of pre-announcement of when something will be released before.
Check the Twitter linked video above. It's bad. Just having PHP running on the server is enough.
https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263 Already being exploited. They need to release the patch now, not later. This is already being deployed by attackers as we speak.
How is the patch still not out yet? This is another case of big tech players all colluding together leaving all the small guys out to dry.
At least this time we can have LLMs rediscover it and make patches ourselves.
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 a shell.
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.
You know how "resulting in a shell" works?
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.
Rethink your strategy
Strange to see this so far down the front page. If the rumors are true, it may be worse than Log4Shell.
No hints as to what versions are affected?
> These vulnerabilities could affect all PHP versions from PHP 5 onwards
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)
I love the "affects PHP... 6" given we never had an official 6 release haha.
Yeah.. their text (unedited).. Maybe they meant 5.6? Only 8.x is "supported" currently, though. I wonder how 3&4 avoided it :)
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50171528