Tell HN: 2x PHP RCE CVEs with CVSS 10.0 Incoming

1 day ago

A reliable source has indicated an announcement is scheduled for 22 October 2026 at 18:00 CEST regarding 2x PHP RCEs with a CVSS score of 10.0.

I have no evidence beyond "source: trust me, bro", but if you're running PHP in production, be ready to update as a priority.

These CVEs reportedly relate to remote code execution in all affected PHP versions from PHP 5 onwards.

These are the two reserved CVEs for the reported upcoming announcement:

CVE-2026-109618

CVE-2026-109619

72 comments

petecooper

Reply
lol768  1 day ago

There comes at point at which it is better for everyone to just disclose the details and pursue Full Disclosure. I think we reached that point hours ago.

It has been incredibly frustrating watching Twitter and that (potentially, I don't know how reliable the leaks are) being a better information source than anything else, at least so that those of us hosting stuff ourselves can try and explore if there are any defensive measures that can be put in place in lieu of any actual fixed builds being released.

I suspect this is already being actively exploited now.

https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263

They've now posted a proof of concept as well.

  • jwitthuhn  1 day ago

    Seems like some of the people engaging in "responsible disclosure" were not very responsible and it leaked out.

    With that info public they do really need to just release the fix, assuming that tweet is accurate.

    edit: Mitigation for impacted versions is to set `session.upload_progress.enabled = Off` in php.ini

    • lol768  21 hours ago

      > edit: Mitigation for impacted versions is to set `session.upload_progress.enabled = Off` in php.ini

      I think this is only partial mitigation: https://x.com/Dinosn/status/2112717168349712734

      I have additionally followed the advice to just ban multipart uploads before the request even touches PHP (luckily my app doesn't use them at all). I do now know if this conclusively resolves it.

    • Webfiletools_de  20 hours ago

      One gotcha for anyone applying this tonight: on a lot of Debian/Ubuntu-style setups the CLI and PHP-FPM read different php.ini files (for example /etc/php/8.x/cli/ vs /etc/php/8.x/fpm/), so "php -i" from a shell can show it Off while the web side still has it On. Check it through a phpinfo() page or the FPM binary itself, and remember to reload php-fpm afterwards. On shared hosting where you can't touch the main ini, it should be settable per directory in .user.ini, but that file is cached for a few minutes by default, so give it time before testing. And as others said, treat it as a stopgap until the actual patch lands.

devttyeu  1 day ago

@dang if the speculations circulating around are anything to go by this is apocalyptic and deserves to be amplified such that the right people see this before it’s too late.

CERT-EU even suggests isolating any systems that may be exposed and can’t be patched quickly.

Speculation is that the affected subsystem runs before any application code and affects all default installs.

samueloph  1 day ago

Deciding to announce it like this is wild, it's an invitation for everyone to put their agents to work in order to find out what the vulnerability is and exploit it, while nobody is allowed to patch it until tomorrow.

vincent_s  17 hours ago

Two things you can do now:

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...

  • Svip  14 hours ago

    Or:

    3. Disable PHP entirely on your server, and live with broken sites until the patch arrives.

    That's what I did; I can live with my sites being down until it's possible to patch PHP. Though, there are likely others who cannot. The CERT-EU advisory is basically advising the same thing[1].

    [1] https://cert.europa.eu/publications/security-advisories/2026...

    • trollbridge  10 hours ago

      I maintain one old site in PHP. This just got way easier to communicate with my users when I can communicate that major government services are also offline.

      Our current plan is to refactor this into Rust using a coding agent. It looks feasible to get this done today.

unreal37  1 day ago

This was supposed to be embargoed.

So your reliable source can't keep a secret.

  • JonKF  13 hours ago

    Responsible disclosure is broken in 2026. All it takes is a vague implication that a vulnerability exists and there are enough people with enough AI tokens that it will be found quickly.

  • petecooper  17 hours ago

    Yeah, she lied when I asked if it was under responsible disclosure/co-ordinated disclosure -- otherwise I wouldn't have posted it!

lioeters  1 day ago

This vulnerability has already been reproduced by a third party with LLM assist. And of course they posted the details on Twitter - and someone else posted the link here just now. So the cat's out of the bag.

That means roughly 70% of all websites (WordPress, Laravel, Drupal, Joomla, Magento) are currently open to remote code execution. About half of that is running an older PHP 5 and 7 that apparently will not receive the urgent security patch.

> Two heap use-after-free primitives in PHP's `session.upload_progress` handler

Guess it's time to rewrite PHP in Rust. Claude, make no mistakes, you can do it!

potaytopotahto  1 day ago

Looks like details about the exploits have already leaked on twitter, if the info is correct then it can be mitigated by setting session.upload_progress.enabled = Off until you get the opportunity to update

Amsozzer  13 hours ago

Hey guys,

I have a long day tomorrow auditing all our php websites and so I wrote a simple CLI tool that finds every place php version is mentioned in a repo eg (Dockerfile tags, compose/k8s images, setup-php in CI, .tool-versions, distro php packages, composer) and flags the end of life branches now.

Floating tags and distro packages can't be labelled deterministically since the tool only reads the files right now so they get labelled "check manually"

I will also update the package as soon as the fixes drop with the updated versioning which will not require anything on the users end (no updates required)

Till then check out npx php2shell-repo-audit . https://github.com/Amsozzer1/php2shell-repo-audit

SchizoDuckie  1 day ago

Well great thanks. I need details now. Where, core? Extensions? What config?

My guess is on some request filtering thing

Numerlor  1 day ago

Well this is about as bad as it gets, so I guess the internet will get a bit of test and old forums will turn into a botnet

potaytopotahto  1 day ago

Details about the exploits have already been leaked on twitter, don't want to put the details here but if its correct then it can be mitigated by setting session.upload_progress.enabled = Off

Jotalea  11 hours ago

well, until the patch drops I'm pretty much vulnerable.

I went and disabled my websites that run on PHP, and I will most likely migrate it to a VPS. maybe even another language like golang.

unethical_ban  21 hours ago

Rumored mitigation from other HN threads:

>Mitigation for impacted versions is to set `session.upload_progress.enabled = Off` in php.ini

It's a feature my wiki doesn't use, so even though I'm patching ASAP it did me no harm in flipping that bit. In fact, I could probably just shut down my server for the day...

edit: I simply shut down my dokuwiki for the day. No one uses it but me anyway.

edit2: https://old.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1xb2utu/upcoming_criti...

Someone claiming to be a releng for PHP says INI settings won't save you.