Comment by nr378
10 hours ago
Looks like a co-ordinated disclosure between Wiz, Calif and OpenAI:
https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce
https://openai.com/index/coordinated-disclosure-of-critical-... (not yet live)
https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit... (not yet live)
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.
[1] https://github.com/php/php-src/security/advisories/GHSA-6wmf...
>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.
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>if you're going to be upset at anyone it should not be the reporters.
Everyone is just upset by AI. So they want to blame the side that was involved with AI. It's like how cops automatically assume black people are criminals.
Why does the PHP security team need to acknowledge it and develop the fix? It's open source software.
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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, and announcing the bug a short time later once anyone using distro updates or otherwise keeping on top of things have updated, would be safer overall than what has happened today is up for debate. I can think of arguments in both directions.
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[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?
This is not a "concern", this is literally what happens. Even prior to AI vulnerability scanning, release notes and diffs for any normal release or security patch of popular software were analysed and used to develop exploits, which could then be applied against non-upgraded instances. Nowadays, AI is doing this en masse and automatically producing exploits. And, as has been demonstrated, nowadays even the rumour of a major security bug is enough for people to find it, as people will immediately burn huge volumes of tokens looking for it.
Nor can you just keep it quiet and smuggle it out in a regular release as you suggest. For one thing, changes in important software are be linked to commits and have pull requests, reviews, etc. Changes without these will immediately raise suspicion, as either a malicious change snuck into a release, or as a "quiet" fix to a major vulnerability, completely undermining the purpose of keeping it quiet in the first place. Moreover, major vulnerability fixes cannot be "quiet", because the whole point is to get as many people as possible to upgrade as quickly as possible. If PHP (or whoever) push out a release containing a major security fix, but don't make this clear, then many people will be in no rush to upgrade, and will get pwned.
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It's not possible to publish a security patch for an open source software report without revealing security details anymore (and as of the past couple weeks I would not count on being able to do that for closed source binaries either). The moment you push publish everyone knows previous versions are compromised
“OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months”
I don’t think this what happened at all, and even less so to specifically call out OpenAI.
The issue was discovered using their model, it was disclosed, and the PHP team took months to address it. Eventually it leaked.
This is a process / people failure that does not involve the people responsible for discovering it.
this is the same tired conversation whenever coordinated disclosure happens
"we the people deserve to know about vulns on day 0"
oh yeah? and what happens when a 0 day is released?
it's the same ignorance over and over.
You can't do secret releases, people will figure out what you added or changed.
But they could have accelerated the patch release once the embargo was broken and rumors of a PoC started going around. There was no need to wait 12+h today until the release.
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.
The NSA does not need to "request" time to use an n-day vuln. They have more 0-days than you can imagine.
They literally employ full-time Vulnerability Researchers doing nothing but 0-day discovery and PoC creation 24/7 to add to their horde. Plus contracting with the MIC for their full-time VRs for the occasional project.
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Php core security team decided who gets to know. The patch was huge it took that long.
See PHP foundation blog post on their timeline
> OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months
The PHP team knew about it since September 21st.
Maximizing the PR value...
> OpenAI and these security companies sat on this for 2 months, decided for themselves who gets access to an early fix
Amazingly, AWS Linux has not been patched yet.
And then they proceeded to cripple any of my agents working on this.
Of course it was OAI that decided those things, not the U.S. Government
it was neither OAI or the US government.
> 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.
After the HN post came up, one security firm included "session.upload_progress.enabled", "session.use_strict_mode", and "php-fpm" in the SEO tags for their initial disclosure that a vulnerability existed. I imagine this was a good hint. https://web.archive.org/web/20261021005246/https://sansec.io... https://x.com/its5q/status/2112700519261032497
The somewhere was a loser on this very website https://daubois.dev/blog/cve-2026-109618-php2shell-rumors/
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> And they botched this as someone talked. To me this looks like they used this for a PR stunt and aimed for an RCE.
This is a pretty constant theme in the infosec industry. The idea is that you want to do the "responsible" thing and let all the major, multi-billion-dollar companies patch first, so you form a secret club. But then, you share a very juicy, gossip-worthy thing with hundreds of people and ask them to sit on it for weeks. And guess what happens: they don't. Having worked for a big tech company, I've been involved on a couple of processes of this sort, and they all suffered leaks.
And rest assured, we'll learn nothing and try the same thing again next month or next year. Because what's the alternative? If you 0-day everyone, you get more hate mail, not less. It's all of sudden about you, not the vulnerable code. Microsoft or Cloudflare calls you irresponsible when asked for a PR statement, industry bloggers bully you, etc.
They haven't even been able to release the patch on time. Ubuntu still hasn't it
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.
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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.
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I had an email from usn recently
at 15:00 UTC, spot checking, Debian 13 has a fix, Ubuntu 26.04 has a fix with their own patch version number, Fedora does not.
Ubuntu: https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-8948-1
Fedora package status: https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/php/php-fpm/
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Wiz is owned by Google and Argon gets the main credits. So difficult to tell these days. But AI is obviously useful here.
Edit: was looking Wiz post when citation was from OpenAI
Of course it's useful, but you can't absolutely not leak something as big as this.
I heard this was leaked several days early and that’s why folks seem to be on the back foot.
I’d press go too - if something this big was known to some but not all…
We’ll all get through together
surprising it took nearly a month to acknowledge the bug
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.
Took them almost 7 years even. According to the Calif write-up it was already reported in 2019 (https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=78876) and 2024 (https://ostif.org/php-audit-complete/).
Lol wait so OpenAI's LLM to discover this vulnerability most likely just looked it up in an old forum post?
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The bug you posted was patched and fixed 6 years ago, and none of the other bugs in the audit showcase that issue. Are you sure these are the right links?
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No way to prevent this, says only language where this regularly happens
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LOL
PHP will always be the slop before AI.
Wiz Khalif AI
So how does the exploit actually work? The best I can find is that they manage to use the corrupted generic decoder state to write a single pointer and associated PHP type information anywhere in memory, then immediately claim "this is RCE". Is that enough? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of such things, after writing code to the target memory you also need to be able to start actually running it. Or do they overwrite the PHP code (which is somewhere in memory) and then let the interpreter do its thing?
I am curious about that, too
Here was a PoC: https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html
But it was withdrawn; now it says that it (CVE-2026-109618) is not an RCE and not even a CVE, apparently an addref call prevents the use-after-free. CVE-2026-109619 is still a memory safe bug, but they have no RCE for that one
Why is WordPress out of that list? Isn't it the single major PHP installation in the whole Internet across hosted and self-hosted instances?
Well, WP is just a program written in PHP.
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?
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They have hosted instances as well though. Not sure their market share though.
Because the CEO of Wordpress has gone insane, basically.
Automattic is on the list, tho.
WordPress is down right now. A bit late for patching though ...
I agree, WordPress should be like the first thing they point out. I'd imagine most WordPress users don't even know it runs on PHP
WizCalif.. dude xD
Do they consider this an example of a "good" response?
It’s in-line with the rest of the pho eco system.
> https://www.php2shell.com/
Boy, do I hate these PR websites masquerading as vulnerability reports. It's slop all the way down with these companies.
I wonder how early the domain was registered and when the first certificate was issued for it, whether you could’ve had advanced notice of this by watching the DNS records
Guess what, there are answers to that question! October 14, 2026 was the date the domain got registered.
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Yet it was leaked and I can't see a single "Here's this piece of code you can run to validate the fix actually works"
It's like slop for infosec markters
[dead]
Thank you, Wiz Khalifa.