> Over the past two months, we led a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security providers to address critical vulnerabilities in PHP, an open-source programming language used to run websites and web applications.
And they botched this as someone talked. To me this looks like they used this for a PR stunt and aimed for an RCE.
If I understood the timeline correctly, there was an announcement made somewhere that an RCE would be announce w/ a patch, and the internet just scanned the entire codebase, they really fumbled this for the sake of having a PR post for OpenAI.
On the other hand, I don't mind AI companies doing this sort of thing, I'm sure a lot of our internet infrastructure could benefit from these sorts of fixes and changes.
Not true. I was able to `aptitude update` and `aptitude full-upgrade` before 10:00 AM EST (9:50 AM) and received the new php8.* packages and upgraded fine.
Debian has, though only for current stable (updates for oldstable and oldoldstable apparently about to drop) which might imply they had no advanced access to the update so could not pre-test and release immediately upon the coordinated announcement.
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 while they failed to properly contain it.
The official interim fix for php8.5 [1] could have been published 24h ago, or even 2 weeks ago, without revealing any security details. Specifically once the POC came online. Would have been significantly more useful than these polished blogs.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but the costs (dev/sre time, missed sales, potential data leaks and hacks) of the way that this was handled is significant.
>OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months
these security companies reported it 2 months ago. it took a month for the php security team to acknowledge it and another month for the php team to develop & release the patch.
if you're going to be upset at anyone it should not be the reporters.
>The official interim fix for php8.5 [1] could have been published 24h ago, or even 2 weeks ago, without revealing any security details.
publishing the fix = publishing the security details.
This really sounds to me like "they filled out some webform" or "sent an email to security@php that read like any of the ten billion we found vulnerability in your code please send money emails they get.
If I had details on a RCE like this I'd report it but if I got no response for a WEEK I'd be trying other venues.
I imagine more details will come out over the coming days, but it’s not uncommon for severity to be under-estimated in the beginning; and then “oh shit” as you dig deeper.
We don’t know when it went from a “memory safety issue” to “php2shell/RCE”.
Finally, at least pre-LLM (and maybe a bit outdated now), responsible security disclosure norms is that you usually do wait for vendor (up to 90d) if there’s no signs of active exploitation. Even if it’s a RCE. Actually, especially if it’s a RCE.
The last thing you wanna do is go pinging random non-security PHP contributors or maintainers and have it leak with zero patch. That is truly the worst outcome.
Yes, this is bad, but also, it’s apparently been bad for decades; and it could’ve been much worse.
According to this post, one of the researchers was a former PHP security lead who already knew about the bug since 2004. So I'd assume they would be taken as credible by the current team https://calif.io/php2shell/
>This really sounds to me like "they filled out some webform" or "sent an email to security@php that read like any of the ten billion we found vulnerability in your code please send money emails
i highly doubt it. these are pretty big names in the security sector who have plenty of experience reporting high severity vulns.
What's the other choice? OpenAI et al could have developed a patch (for all we know they did) but you need the PHP team's participation to get it out. The alternative would be to fork the project and put up a forked release with the fix, which would have been incredibly disruptive.
One concern with the current environment is that as soon as a release comes out for such an important open source project, people will immediately point bots at the release to look for changes that might be related to existing security issues. This means that putting out a quick out-of-band release is guaranteed to result in people racing to exploit the problem before many even know there is an update out.
Whether keeping the update quiet and including it in the next normal release, where there are more trees obscuring the wood that is the security concern, would be safer overall than what has happened today is up for debate. I can think of arguments in both directions.
--------
[1] which does have a slight whiff of AI marketing about it - would a human-found issue, without the option of a big AI company to claim some credit, have been handled differently?
Maybe the NSA ‘requested’ some time to use the exploit on some high value targets.
Sure, it’s PHP, but plenty of companies or organisations might have some PHP running somewhere; and once you’re in, lateral movement becomes a lot easier.
This isn't a terribly uncommon method of 'discovery'. In maths and sciences there have been tons of papers that have highlighted something new but were never really connected to anything else and then largely forgotten. Later they are picked up by someone else and connected to a much bigger whole.
One of the most common PHP based applications out there, therefore a good comms channel (via their forums and any mailing lists, both public and for people who have managed instances with them or are otherwise paying for support contracts) to make sure people are aware of the need to update. That would make the company one worth keeping in the loop, if only in one direction, I would have thought?
Fair point. I thought that had died down, though for some years I've not had reason to keep particularly informed about the state of WP so I could be missing a lot of hot gossip.
It can mean either, it's a consequence of how github optimized their backend storage so a 100 forks of a repo initially take up the same space as 0 forks
This is obviously bad, but in my 20 years of hosting with PHP, I've never had to take the steps of taking down servers preemptively. It's not good, but honestly, and I think the way this was handled could leave a lot to be desired, I think this might be the "worst" we've had with PHP, and it took a while to get here.
Not even $700 a month? Seriously, there must be thousands of highly profitable companies depending on this guy’s maintenance. Once this is all sorted, please hassle your employers to give something back to him!
Yeah this, I always see so much hate towards businesses for finding tax loopholes or not donating etc but people forget that businesses are made of individuals with their own often conflicting subgoals, but overall has to try to maximize profit so they will never voluntarily pay more tax than legal minimum or be philanthropic if they do not have to or do not benefit explicitly.
So far Ubuntu LTS isn’t picking up the new packages for me via apt update, and Laravel Forge appears completely unresponsive as a result of being flooded by people trying to update their servers.
And I'm maintaining a box on 18.04 over here, and lo and behold its Pro subscription isn't showing up as active, so I couldn't get the update even if they do release it.
Going to migrate the box to Debian in-place. (Or Gentoo, the way things are currently going.)
i just took down all my PHP sites for the last few hours. they’re proxied behind Cloudflare so i know there were mitigations, but infrastructure can’t be breached if it isn’t running!
>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.
Since I have to go through a bunch of php repos today at work I ended up releasing a CLI tool that automates that process by listing out the steps you need to take to stay away from the vulnerability.
Here's the link incase it helps anyone https://github.com/Amsozzer1/php2shell-repo-audit
Dude, today of all days is not when I'm going to trust some random CLI tool that was vibed out. I'm not saying your work isn't helpful, but it would probably be a lot better to just release your prompts you used to build this and let others build it on their own.
I wouldn't listen to him. This is very helpful to people that might be managing dozens or hundreds of servers and need a way to quickly figure out things. It's literally open source and we can point our agent to it and have it examine the source code for anything that looks suspicious first. No need to sit here for a couple hours trying to go back and forth and create something that you already took the time to do. Thanks for the work!
Many vendors do it, but on a set schedule "patch Tuesday" and some will release vague "mitigation steps" but honestly those usually come with the patch.
Debian always seems to be the grown-ups. I'm a Linux novice so I couldn't get Nvidia drivers working on it but that's the only reason it's not running on my desktops.
What I've been feeling lately is that security vulnerabilities will inevitably keep being discovered, and I worry whether humans can ever patch all of them.
"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -Rasmus Lerdorf
What I did on our WordPress boxes while waiting for distro packages (CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619)
1. session.upload_progress.enabled = Off, in php.ini and as php_admin_flag in every FPM pool, so per-directory config can't turn it back on. It's one of the two confirmed consumers in GHSA-6wmf, and the validated FPM path depends on it. Almost nobody uses it, and the advisory suggests leaving it off even after patching.
2. Refuse multipart request bodies at the web server, before PHP parses them. All of the GHSA-w8hw out-of-memory strategies go through multipart parsing. On Apache it's a rewrite rule matching a Content-Type of multipart/form-data that returns 403. On Caddy it's a header matcher that responds 403. The cost: every browser upload breaks (media library, plugin zips, importers). Check your public forms first.
3. Check your SAPI. Both bugs have confirmed RCE against mod_php. FPM is narrower: the validated path needs upload_progress, and the early INI consumer only applies if your front end sends PHP_VALUE/PHP_ADMIN_VALUE. To check, grep your Apache, nginx and Caddy configs for it, and run apache2ctl -M | grep php.
4. pm.max_requests = 1 in the pools. A worker serves one request and exits, which breaks the stale-state chain: the "producer" and "consumer" requests must land on the same worker. It costs a fork per request.
5. Lower max_input_nesting_level and post_max_size, per the advisory.
6. Housekeeping that should already be done: no .php served from uploads directories, and remove any stray phpinfo.php. Scanners request it constantly, and it tells an attacker your exact build.
I’d rather just some sort of tag. Because sometimes it can be useful. This is a case where the community here can scrutinize the output and actually pull out useful data or steps or even starting points when information is coming in so fast for a developing story/issue
The (pretty obviously Claude'd) responses with actual steps you could take to mitigate were 1000% more useful to me than the "SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN WE'RE GONNA DIE" and the "stop posting AI slop" posts were, that's for sure.
It was your response. Of course you prefer your response.
The fact is you had no idea how useful or dangerous your advice was. PHP maintainers said to shut it down, how many people followed your advice instead? Did it work or just leave them vulnerable? Do you know?
Because you're heavily implying that the people who knew about the details of the vulnerability were panicking and thank god we had you with an LLM
Why don't you do something useful and rewrite it so it's not claude output any more, but says the same thing in a way that you're satisfied with?
Then your own comment would not be such low effort and useless human slop.
Do you agree or disagree with the comment's claims? Did YOU verify anything? Let's all hear you fact check and proofread and reword what it said so it matches your standards, instead of just listening to you bitch and complain without offering any useful information.
Or do you not actually know anything about PHP administration, programming, and security, so you're only capable of information-free drive-by anti-ai posts, without any other useful content or corrections?
People have been saying this for the past 16 years, but the reality is once a system is in production over time it becomes increasingly risky to replace it. Because over the life of a piece of software you make tons of small fixes, resolve bugs, adding customer-specific functionality, etc. that you'd completely overlook when planning our requirements for a rewrite. Which is a big problem when other systems are dependent on the software operating a specific way i.e. APIs, web services, and so forth. Not to mention the economics of a rewrite also has to make sense. Nobody is going to spend 2-3 years recreating what they already had and get no additional functionality out of it. Certain software basically has to get so bad that literally anything replacing it is better than what came before for replacing it to be the right approach.
For anyone who can't patch their PHP for some reason, here is a proxy that eliminates the threat for you -- it's open source, you can add it to your servers:
https://github.com/Qbix/proxy -- open source MIT licensed, I made github actions compile it as a Cosmopolitan binary so it can work across many operating systems (thanks Justine)
I wrote it so I could deploy it myself on our old nginx + php-fpm setups, thought I would share. It should work with all top servers (nginx, apache, caddy etc)
You're right – need to fix the Cosmopolitan build in GitHub actions. On it!
UPDATE: Just going to ship a Linux binary for now, that's where most hosting is. Almost no one hosts from a MacOS or Windows machine. The Cosmo binary was overkill here.
It's free, MIT open source. It was the best I could do. Run it under a Linux user with no permissions to access anything. All it's supposed to do is proxy requests. Don't give it access to any files.
You know, normally I'd be okay with these comments, but in this case you're actively hurting a lot of people by this bullshit. Many people need something other than patching PHP.
It's free and MIT licensed, open source and it is currently the only alternative to patching your PHP. The "profit" is for people who don't get PWNED today!!!
Many people can't patch your PHP. If you can't be bothered to even look at the repo, you may want to sit this one out.
The one we're in right now, where we're waiting for vendors to rebuild the packages (I'm ass-blasted that the delay to 14:00 UTC wasn't for the vendors to build packages but seems to be a PR stunt?).
https://www.php2shell.com/
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
https://calif.io/php2shell/
https://openai.com/index/coordinated-disclosure-of-critical-... (not yet live)
https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit... (not yet live)
And they botched this as someone talked. To me this looks like they used this for a PR stunt and aimed for an RCE.
On the other hand, I don't mind AI companies doing this sort of thing, I'm sure a lot of our internet infrastructure could benefit from these sorts of fixes and changes.
Edit: was looking Wiz post when citation was from OpenAI
I’d press go too - if something this big was known to some but not all…
We’ll all get through together
The official interim fix for php8.5 [1] could have been published 24h ago, or even 2 weeks ago, without revealing any security details. Specifically once the POC came online. Would have been significantly more useful than these polished blogs.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but the costs (dev/sre time, missed sales, potential data leaks and hacks) of the way that this was handled is significant.
[1] https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-6wmf...
these security companies reported it 2 months ago. it took a month for the php security team to acknowledge it and another month for the php team to develop & release the patch.
if you're going to be upset at anyone it should not be the reporters.
>The official interim fix for php8.5 [1] could have been published 24h ago, or even 2 weeks ago, without revealing any security details.
publishing the fix = publishing the security details.
If I had details on a RCE like this I'd report it but if I got no response for a WEEK I'd be trying other venues.
We don’t know when it went from a “memory safety issue” to “php2shell/RCE”.
Finally, at least pre-LLM (and maybe a bit outdated now), responsible security disclosure norms is that you usually do wait for vendor (up to 90d) if there’s no signs of active exploitation. Even if it’s a RCE. Actually, especially if it’s a RCE.
The last thing you wanna do is go pinging random non-security PHP contributors or maintainers and have it leak with zero patch. That is truly the worst outcome.
Yes, this is bad, but also, it’s apparently been bad for decades; and it could’ve been much worse.
i highly doubt it. these are pretty big names in the security sector who have plenty of experience reporting high severity vulns.
Whether keeping the update quiet and including it in the next normal release, where there are more trees obscuring the wood that is the security concern, would be safer overall than what has happened today is up for debate. I can think of arguments in both directions.
--------
[1] which does have a slight whiff of AI marketing about it - would a human-found issue, without the option of a big AI company to claim some credit, have been handled differently?
Sure, it’s PHP, but plenty of companies or organisations might have some PHP running somewhere; and once you’re in, lateral movement becomes a lot easier.
August 24, 2026: Wiz Research reports the vulnerabilities to the PHP security team.
September 21, 2026: PHP acknowledges the reports and begins developing a coordinated fix.
Boy, do I hate these PR websites masquerading as vulnerability reports. It's slop all the way down with these companies.
https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-w8hw...
https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-6wmf...
Well off to a good start here.
> Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed.
https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-21-5
> This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.
Glorious. Today of all days it would genuinely give me pause for caution.
edit: yeah, really not feeling that: https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/php-8.2.34..php-8.2.3...
Hopefully just a mistake? But looks like a botched release at the least
Is it perhaps a bit misleading, and only means that there's no branch containing that commit?
https://www.patreon.com/cw/oerdnj
follow https://packages.sury.org/php/README.txt
https://codeberg.org/oerdnj/deb.sury.org/issues/145#issuecom...
Going to migrate the box to Debian in-place. (Or Gentoo, the way things are currently going.)
awake2death or something
It feels like many times PRs could just be that.
Now are available in the php-src github
https://github.com/php/php-src/tags
https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1
https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=php8.2&suite=...
By simply searching for websites that used local includes to load other pages, you could get RCE.
At this point, running webapps in JS workers/sandboxes sounds like a good idea. Vendors take care of patching.
What everyone is looking for.
I assume it just got pushed?
Is this even reachable on Linux due to overcommit? Maybe by attempting a single extremely large allocation?
"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say 'Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that.' I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests." -Rasmus Lerdorf
1. session.upload_progress.enabled = Off, in php.ini and as php_admin_flag in every FPM pool, so per-directory config can't turn it back on. It's one of the two confirmed consumers in GHSA-6wmf, and the validated FPM path depends on it. Almost nobody uses it, and the advisory suggests leaving it off even after patching.
2. Refuse multipart request bodies at the web server, before PHP parses them. All of the GHSA-w8hw out-of-memory strategies go through multipart parsing. On Apache it's a rewrite rule matching a Content-Type of multipart/form-data that returns 403. On Caddy it's a header matcher that responds 403. The cost: every browser upload breaks (media library, plugin zips, importers). Check your public forms first.
3. Check your SAPI. Both bugs have confirmed RCE against mod_php. FPM is narrower: the validated path needs upload_progress, and the early INI consumer only applies if your front end sends PHP_VALUE/PHP_ADMIN_VALUE. To check, grep your Apache, nginx and Caddy configs for it, and run apache2ctl -M | grep php.
4. pm.max_requests = 1 in the pools. A worker serves one request and exits, which breaks the stale-state chain: the "producer" and "consumer" requests must land on the same worker. It costs a fork per request.
5. Lower max_input_nesting_level and post_max_size, per the advisory.
6. Housekeeping that should already be done: no .php served from uploads directories, and remove any stray phpinfo.php. Scanners request it constantly, and it tells an attacker your exact build.
The fact is you had no idea how useful or dangerous your advice was. PHP maintainers said to shut it down, how many people followed your advice instead? Did it work or just leave them vulnerable? Do you know?
Because you're heavily implying that the people who knew about the details of the vulnerability were panicking and thank god we had you with an LLM
Then your own comment would not be such low effort and useless human slop.
Do you agree or disagree with the comment's claims? Did YOU verify anything? Let's all hear you fact check and proofread and reword what it said so it matches your standards, instead of just listening to you bitch and complain without offering any useful information.
Or do you not actually know anything about PHP administration, programming, and security, so you're only capable of information-free drive-by anti-ai posts, without any other useful content or corrections?
Ball's in your court.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181752
https://github.com/Qbix/proxy -- open source MIT licensed, I made github actions compile it as a Cosmopolitan binary so it can work across many operating systems (thanks Justine)
I wrote it so I could deploy it myself on our old nginx + php-fpm setups, thought I would share. It should work with all top servers (nginx, apache, caddy etc)
UPDATE: Just going to ship a Linux binary for now, that's where most hosting is. Almost no one hosts from a MacOS or Windows machine. The Cosmo binary was overkill here.
It's free and MIT licensed, open source and it is currently the only alternative to patching your PHP. The "profit" is for people who don't get PWNED today!!!
Many people can't patch your PHP. If you can't be bothered to even look at the repo, you may want to sit this one out.
https://github.com/Qbix/proxy