Comment by ufmace
12 hours ago
I suppose it may not be there for actually taking it, but it does serve as a good demonstration of the realistic risk for average people running relatively low-value PHP sites. If nobody thinks it's worth the risk of exposure for a quick and easy $1k in Bitcoin (at the time I'm writing this), why would anybody bother hacking a site that's basically worthless, like the dinky little Wordpress blog I run?
This does effectively make the statement that, there probably are exploits out there for this, but even with a non-updated version, you're not at much risk unless someone with serious resources thinks they can make pretty big money from compromising your thing.
That's always the case for a novel exploit. There isn't a lot of value in popping somebody's PHP blog, so people who've invested time and money into a zero-day exploit have little incentive to use it for that purpose.
The white hats want to extend the time before an exploit is in the hands of the masses who might do so just for the fun of it, and the black hats want to use it on high-value targets.
I think the point is that this is completely the opposite of the narrative that was pushed about this bug - that there would be thousands+ of AI agents actively compromising every vulnerable site automatically regardless of value within minutes of the fix being released into the wild. Well, now it's 3 days after, and this has been up for 3.5 hours, and nobody has taken it yet.
random sites generally don't log carefully, or watch their logs if they do. so the risk to hacking them is low. this site almost certainly logs very aggressively. so the risk to hacking it is high.
based on differential risk, attackers will choose targets differently. they might reason that the risk/reward on this obvious trap is not worth it. but on joe shmo's php emporium, the reward is less, but so is the risk, and it might pencil out.
So your answer is people could hack this easily but logs scare them?
Well that's good news because my webserver also has logging
> that's good news because my webserver also has logging
In the future, every website will carry a little blurb of text in the footer of their pages intended to scare off would-be hackers and their AI agents:
“The server of this website employs append-only remote logging and state-of-the-art monitoring and intrusion detection. Unauthorized access or attempts there of WILL be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The outcome of such prosecution is and always will be astronomical amounts of money in damages that the guilty party will pay to the victim, alongside decades of prison time for the party guilty of computer crimes. Do not even try.”
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What risk?