I'm actually somewhat surprised at the clumsiness here.
I'm a complete amateur that had DeepSeek build a PHP2Shell exploit, and once the stealmybitcoin site went up and set an upload limit, i had DeepSeek try to shrink/amplify it.
DeepSeek couldn't find anything but a 2x reduction, but reading the report of how it was done - https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC - I was somewhat surprised it didn't find it, and equally horrified at PHP allowing such a memory bomb of creating nested objects by parsing `f[0][x][x]...` from random requests.
Point being; these aren't amateurs but i kind of expect most well funded pros to have found this method to avoid sending massive filenames and session progress data.
Reading this I'm almost certain the firewall vendor is Palo Alto Networks. They included a PAN-OS setting verbatim and the SELinux config matches my experience.
Why does a world-class firewall stack need PHP? I'm sure PAN-OS has some neat DPI features, but I would love to see firewalls that are implemented in FPGA, where the tasking was compiled down to gates to be performed deterministically, much like the low port count network switches we have today.
For our US friends, as context, this is akin to Rudy Giuliani being a cybersecurity expert. Partly, because it simply never was Sebastian Kurzs area of expertise, mainly because the referenced corruption scandal centered around the use of Whatsapp to facilitate said corruption, so, you know...
He has already IT experience then. Surely he learned something out of it. Securely using apps. Discretely handling deals, etc.
Anyway from their webpage:
> We work directly with heads of state, ministries, national cyber authorities, and the senior officials responsible for executing national strategy.
So I presume he has and provides contacts. Just the usual one hand washes the other. Nothing nefarious I'm sure.
Extremely wrong. I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone. Exploiting the PHP request parser bypasses basically all security checks and it doesn't matter how secure your code is because the exploitable component runs before your code and can't be disabled.
I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day.
"There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day."
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
> I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone
It could be overblown if it's not true. The amount of time it took for anyone to claim the Bitcoin from the supposedly-vulnerable PHP site convinced a lot of people that the vulnerability was not as bad as claimed.
> I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
Not having made the claim (took down my website too), but because PHP is not connected directly to the network. While you cannot prevent PHP from being overtaken from inside the PHP program, you can prevent PHP being executed on malicious data by configuring the webserver. It's overblown in the sense that it would be even more serious if the same happened in the webserver itself.
I think it goes back to the huge amount of anti-AI sentiment that's out there today. Any AI accomplishment gets undersold by haters, i.e. people maintaining that the Navier-Stokes solution was stolen, people saying that Lean proofs can't be relied on, exploits like PHP2Shell are esoteric and not usable in the real-world, etc. Those are just comments I recall reading off the top of my head but I could find sources if anyone wants. I think it's just a way for people to cope and fool themselves into thinking that this whole AI thing isn't a big deal and will just blow over.
Its overblown in the sense that 70% of the internet was not in fact vulnerable, as widely reported. And not everyone is a hackor because they have access to llms. Go look at normie coverage from people like Linus tech tips and you'll see them saying how millions of servers were under attack by script kiddies with llms, amd how llms are so dangerous.
The whole thing was basically a psyop, whether intential or not idk but Califs research was funded in part by OpenAI so there's that.
Respect, hats off to reevaluate when presented with the info. Will fully admit, I myself lacked the ability to assess the true severity, mainly cause I try to stay away from PHP since my first encounter in sixth grade, so was going a bit back-and-forth due to what I was reading.
Mainly saw the severity in the economic impact of having to quickly patch so much, but taking offline being the right choice given the risk, along with of course all the decades old, never patches, blogs being botnet targets someday in the future, akin to Wordpress being commonly used for Ransomware hosting for similar reasons. And of course hopefully learning something from the timeline and leak for future disclosures. Feel things need to generally change from the status quo, barely has changed since the 2015 Google/MSFT squabble...
Yes, you were. These exploits are happening in processes like php-fpm before it actually executes any code for the web application, so its not like you need to find endpoint where a specific class is being invoked or anything like that.
Nah, I guess it is Palo Alto. PHP and Appweb is their stack AFAIK. Forti does not use PHP, Juniper uses Appweb with PHP but on FreeBSD - but the article mentions SELinux.
it probably starts with a correct and safe authorization check, but this vulnerability happens before any user code runs, so every PHP page is vulnerable.
True-ish? If your firewall's admin page is internet-accessible, you have no excuse for not doing "bolted to bedrock" lockdowns of your web server config and your PHP config. Either of which could have blocked exploitation of the PHP vuln.
> A1 — Memory Exhaustion (~383MB):
I'm actually somewhat surprised at the clumsiness here.
I'm a complete amateur that had DeepSeek build a PHP2Shell exploit, and once the stealmybitcoin site went up and set an upload limit, i had DeepSeek try to shrink/amplify it.
DeepSeek couldn't find anything but a 2x reduction, but reading the report of how it was done - https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC - I was somewhat surprised it didn't find it, and equally horrified at PHP allowing such a memory bomb of creating nested objects by parsing `f[0][x][x]...` from random requests.
Point being; these aren't amateurs but i kind of expect most well funded pros to have found this method to avoid sending massive filenames and session progress data.
Interesting, my deepseek session did find it.
this featured is disabled in any security conscious deployed (which doesn't seem to be the case for some large firewall vendor)
Reading this I'm almost certain the firewall vendor is Palo Alto Networks. They included a PAN-OS setting verbatim and the SELinux config matches my experience.
Further indication is that PHP 7.4.33 and PHP 8.30.0 are mentioned which are an exact match for PAN-OS 11.1/11.2 and 12.1/12.2 respectively
Why does a world-class firewall stack need PHP? I'm sure PAN-OS has some neat DPI features, but I would love to see firewalls that are implemented in FPGA, where the tasking was compiled down to gates to be performed deterministically, much like the low port count network switches we have today.
2 replies →
public markets point to FORTINET
Dream is btw founded and led by Sebastian Kurz, who was head of the Austrian government. He had to step down because of a corruption scandal.
For our US friends, as context, this is akin to Rudy Giuliani being a cybersecurity expert. Partly, because it simply never was Sebastian Kurzs area of expertise, mainly because the referenced corruption scandal centered around the use of Whatsapp to facilitate said corruption, so, you know...
Well it's more like Rudy Giuliani starting a bitcoin company regardless of his expertise in any one particular area right, which basically has happened a couple times now: https://www.ai-cio.com/news/former-associates-rudy-giuliani-...
1 reply →
He has already IT experience then. Surely he learned something out of it. Securely using apps. Discretely handling deals, etc.
Anyway from their webpage: > We work directly with heads of state, ministries, national cyber authorities, and the senior officials responsible for executing national strategy.
So I presume he has and provides contacts. Just the usual one hand washes the other. Nothing nefarious I'm sure.
1 reply →
One of the three co-founders also founded NSO Group, and was developing the Pegasus malware.
Just for context, that is the type of evil we're talking about here.
A German comedian made an episode about it [1]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=_PF23EdGNcE
[flagged]
1 reply →
> For security purposes, we are not disclosing the vendor or the affected versions
Wat
perhaps i was wrong
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272530
Extremely wrong. I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone. Exploiting the PHP request parser bypasses basically all security checks and it doesn't matter how secure your code is because the exploitable component runs before your code and can't be disabled.
I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day.
"There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day."
19 hours: https://stealmybitcoin.com/
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
6 replies →
> I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone
It could be overblown if it's not true. The amount of time it took for anyone to claim the Bitcoin from the supposedly-vulnerable PHP site convinced a lot of people that the vulnerability was not as bad as claimed.
11 replies →
> I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
Not having made the claim (took down my website too), but because PHP is not connected directly to the network. While you cannot prevent PHP from being overtaken from inside the PHP program, you can prevent PHP being executed on malicious data by configuring the webserver. It's overblown in the sense that it would be even more serious if the same happened in the webserver itself.
11 replies →
I think it goes back to the huge amount of anti-AI sentiment that's out there today. Any AI accomplishment gets undersold by haters, i.e. people maintaining that the Navier-Stokes solution was stolen, people saying that Lean proofs can't be relied on, exploits like PHP2Shell are esoteric and not usable in the real-world, etc. Those are just comments I recall reading off the top of my head but I could find sources if anyone wants. I think it's just a way for people to cope and fool themselves into thinking that this whole AI thing isn't a big deal and will just blow over.
Its overblown in the sense that 70% of the internet was not in fact vulnerable, as widely reported. And not everyone is a hackor because they have access to llms. Go look at normie coverage from people like Linus tech tips and you'll see them saying how millions of servers were under attack by script kiddies with llms, amd how llms are so dangerous.
The whole thing was basically a psyop, whether intential or not idk but Califs research was funded in part by OpenAI so there's that.
3 replies →
Respect, hats off to reevaluate when presented with the info. Will fully admit, I myself lacked the ability to assess the true severity, mainly cause I try to stay away from PHP since my first encounter in sixth grade, so was going a bit back-and-forth due to what I was reading.
Mainly saw the severity in the economic impact of having to quickly patch so much, but taking offline being the right choice given the risk, along with of course all the decades old, never patches, blogs being botnet targets someday in the future, akin to Wordpress being commonly used for Ransomware hosting for similar reasons. And of course hopefully learning something from the timeline and leak for future disclosures. Feel things need to generally change from the status quo, barely has changed since the 2015 Google/MSFT squabble...
Yes, you were. These exploits are happening in processes like php-fpm before it actually executes any code for the web application, so its not like you need to find endpoint where a specific class is being invoked or anything like that.
I commend you to having corrected your thoughts this publicly fwiw.
We need more of this.
I am confused. Is this attack possible even after the PHP patches OR these servers just didn't patch ?
> The affected devices run specific versions of a large vendor’s firewall software.
And the vendor's firewall software runs an unpatched version.
I bet it's fortinet.
2 replies →
Wild, I hope the challenge on HN didn't contribute to this.
With software being fundamentally unsafe I see everything hardwired in chips.
FPGA stocks? DV is about to become hot again..
It sounds like multiple things were misconfigured on these servers and they still have access?!?
> Claude Code had been installed
I just do not understand. CC is not the sole harness in the world, why the attackers insist to use it.
Firewalls are likely fortinet
Nah, I guess it is Palo Alto. PHP and Appweb is their stack AFAIK. Forti does not use PHP, Juniper uses Appweb with PHP but on FreeBSD - but the article mentions SELinux.
Now let’s watch the goalposts shift in real time about how severe this vulnerability is.
Most goalposts I’ve seen say “bad but clumsy”.
Believe it or not in cybersecurity there are many considerations in how “bad” a vulnerability is.
With all that said, how exploit chaining is working these days I think most peoples considerations are not weighted toward bad enough.
Haha woopsie
Same here, though what stuck with me is that a firewall's admin PHP page was reachable from the internet at all, keep that on a mgmt VLAN.
it probably starts with a correct and safe authorization check, but this vulnerability happens before any user code runs, so every PHP page is vulnerable.
True-ish? If your firewall's admin page is internet-accessible, you have no excuse for not doing "bolted to bedrock" lockdowns of your web server config and your PHP config. Either of which could have blocked exploitation of the PHP vuln.
3 replies →