Comment by simonw
12 hours ago
Timeline from that article:
August 19, 2026: Wiz Research discovers the first PHP vulnerability using Wiz Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol.
August 20, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against Drupal.
August 21, 2026: Unauthenticated RCE is confirmed against WordPress.
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.
October 21, 2026: Patched PHP releases become available.
October 21, 2026: Public disclosure.
I want to understand how it leaked. I guess a whole lot of people were looped in between September 21 and October 21?
> I want to understand how it leaked. I guess a whole lot of people were looped in between September 21 and October 21?
Yes. I was at AWS when Spectre and Meltdown were discovered, and we received approximately a month of advance notice and put together teams to apply mitigations. The work of the team was on a need-to-know basis--even team members' managers only knew they were pulled onto a critical project, not what the specific project was. But there were still 30+ people in the company who knew, and that was just one company (I'm guessing Google/Azure/other cloud providers got similar advance notice).
Now, this is a much wider scale vulnerability, in the sense that Spectre/Meltdown primarily impacted cloud providers, but this attack impacts literally anyone who runs PHP. Dozens, if not hundreds, of companies likely got advance notice that a patch needed to be installed. In those companies there are teams of people applying those patches. All it takes is one of them who wants 15 minutes of internet fame to leak the details.
Even some smaller vulnerabilities are spread through hosting companies pretty quickly within a day or two prior to public release, to give teams time to make sure staff will be ready to patch immediately.
The wider the pre-release news spreads, the more chance you get someone who will spill the beans (intentionally or not).
Two months is way too long for this, and the people involved seem to not know the "way" to do this - it shouldn't have taken a month from "reports" to "PHP acknowledges" which smells like "we sent an email or filled out a web form" when the ACTUAL reporting mechanism is "we talked to our friends at <MAJOR DISTRO> or <WORDPRESS> who called the right people and a patch is being slipped in."
There's an answer in https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit...
> On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is 9.2). No technical details leaked [...]
> As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities. Copies of the deleted video started circulating on social media soon after.
> I want to understand how it leaked
If I understand correctly someone showed off a video of exploit in action - just like the ones included in article - and the visible messages were enough for other LLM users to discover the exploited bug.
How did the person who shared the video hear about the exploit?
Were they already looped in or was it circulating outside of the trusted group already?
From what I gather, https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263 figured it out after the disclosure by wiz.io and openai (which I think was 24h before the patch landed). So they then used AI models to analyze the php code and independently found the vulnerabilities.
So, if that is correct then the problem was the 24h prior notice about the patches, which gave time for people to use AI to find the bugs.
that's the million-dollar question currently. The guy posting the movie on X is referring back to Calif.io and other person as the creators of the video. Also, it's not a working exploit, but a video of a PoC, including a dancing manga character, so I'm wondering why a company like Calif.io creates such a thing. Another "interesting" development: chainguard unilaterally decided to break embargo 6 hours before the official publishing, by releasing patched container images. Why???
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It would have been nice if there had been time for downstream distributors to patch as well.
> I want to understand how it leaked
I'm confused. How do you know it leaked?
Simon, it seems you spend too much time close to the AIs and your writing is getting flagged.