Attackers can steal credentials and begin exfiltrating data within minutes, often before security teams can respond. Exaforce examines real-world attacks involving stolen GitHub tokens, malicious AI installers, and MFA phishing, explaining why faster detection and automated containment are critical.
Security researchers at Amazon Threat Intelligence say attackers began targeting the PHP2Shell flaws four days before security patches were released on Wednesday. Tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, the two critical vulnerabilities let attackers gain remote code execution (RCE) on vulnerable systems. The PHP security team patched them on October 21 after urging admins one day earlier to prepare to install the updates as soon as they became available. PHP core developer Gina Peter Banyard warned before disclosure that applying the official security patches is the only permanent defense, while the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) asked UK organizations to immediately update PHP servers or take them offline until they can be patched. The PHP team says that everything went according to plan until two days before the coordinated disclosure, when it had to speed up the targeted release date starting October 20 after some details on the PHP2Shell security flaws (including the two CVE IDs and mitigation advice provided to some critical infrastructure providers) leaked online.
Amazon's Threat Intelligence team on Wednesday said it detected an attempt to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities dating back to October 17, 2026, against its MadPot honeypot service, as the flaws come under broad exploitation in the wild following the release of the patches. "The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network,
Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed that a China state-aligned actor dubbed Storm-0940 was behind the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application. During the incident, Storm-0940 used ARTEX, a Go-based agentic AI penetration testing framework that was made closed-source in the wake of its abuse in cyber attacks targeting South Korean financial institutions, to speed
Chrome is getting new scam protections that use Gemini to detect deceptive websites and warn users when they copy suspicious commands from ClickFix attacks. The changes are part of Enhanced Protection in Safe Browsing, which Google claims makes users ten times safer from phishing, social engineering, notification abuse, and other scams compared with Standard Protection. Chrome is also adding a new "suspicious site" warning for pages that show deceptive patterns but haven't reached the confidence level required for its existing full-page red warning. "Suspicious site warnings notify users when a page exhibits deceptive patterns commonly associated with known malicious sites," the company explained. "By tailoring the warning UI in this way, we are able to safely expand our coverage to display a higher volume of protective warnings."
Vulnerability overview On October 20, 2026, the PHP security team published a preliminary notice regarding an upcoming emergency release that addresses two critical vulnerabilities (both rated 9.2 on the CVSS scale). The patches were released on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 14:00 UTC. The release was expedited after information about the vulnerabilities was leaked to the public before the scheduled embargo was lifted. In a post on Hacker News, a user reported two RCE vulnerabilities in PHP, allegedly affecting all versions starting with PHP 5.4.0. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Shortly after the post appeared, researchers confirmed the existence of the vulnerabilities. Along with the leak of details, an exploit unofficially named PHP2Shell appeared online. In the leaked demo video, the exploit is shown in action on web servers running WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Magento, Joomla, Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, and WHMCS — platforms that power many modern websites. The authenticity of the demonstration and the exact behavior of the exploit had not been independently verified at the time of publication. According to the researcher who published the PoC, the vulnerabilities are related to the handling of the multipart/form-data MIME type in conjunction with the session upload progress mechanism (session.upload_progress) in the PHP core and fall under the categories of use-after-free and memory corruption. This means that the flaws cannot be patched via application code, and the only possible fix is to update PHP on the server. The attack works without authentication: an attacker with network access to a PHP application can execute arbitrary code on behalf of the PHP process without needing to authenticate. Security advisories issued by PHP on October 21 confirm this information. The vulnerabilities affect PHP versions 5, 6, 7, and 8. As of this publication, branches from 8.2 to 8.5 are supported. Older branches, including PHP 8.1, 8.0, 7.x, and 5.x, have reached the end of their lifecycle; however, due to the critical severity of the vulnerabilities, backported patches have also been released for versions 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1. Sansec experts estimate that widespread exploitation could begin within 15 minutes of the update’s release. We strongly recommend that administrators responsible for publicly accessible PHP web servers take the following steps before the patch is available: Conduct an inventory of all PHP-based systems in the infrastructure (including web servers, control panels, third-party software, etc.). Disable upload-progress: set session.upload_progress.enabled = Off using the php_admin_flag in PHP-FPM pools. Block multipart requests on nginx and Apache servers. Consider temporarily isolating PHP applications that connect to the Internet until fixes are released. Ensure readiness to install the patch immediately upon its release. Plan to migrate servers running unsupported versions (8.1 and earlier) to the latest PHP branch. Detection by Kaspersky solutions Kaspersky solutions detect the described malicious activity at various stages of the attack. Possible detection scenarios are listed below. When an attempt is made to exploit these RCE vulnerabilities, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response promptly alerts the user to suspicious actions performed in the context of a web server, on both Linux and Windows machines. This activity is detected by the following rules: creating_windows_shell_from_a_web_servers_process; possible_web_shell_creating_via_exploit; spawning_process_from_webserver_more_filters_linux; webserver_interpreter_execution_linux; executable_file_in_www_folder. Detection of the PHP2Shell vulnerability exploit by KEDR Exploitation of the PHP2Shell vulnerability in network traffic is detected by Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack (KATA). This solution detects such activity with the following verdicts: Exploit.CVE-2026-109618.HTTP.C&C and Exploit.CVE-2026-109619.HTTP.C&C. Detection of the PHP2Shell vulnerability exploit by KATA Our Kaspersky Endpoint Security solution, now available as Kaspersky Next, also detects malicious post-exploitation activity using the Behavior Detection component, such as PDM:Exploit.Linux.Generic and PDM:Exploit.Win32.Generic.
The PHP security team released emergency security patches for two critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) tracked collectively as PHP2Shell. The two unauthenticated RCE flaws were discovered by Calif, Wiz, and OpenAI security researchers, and affect all PHP installations that serve web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP, and LiteSpeed. "We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs," the PHP security team said. Both flaws stem from the same underlying problem: PHP can leave its memory in a corrupted state when a request ends abnormally, and both can be exploited to achieve remote code execution. CVE-2026-109618 can be used to gain remote code execution as the web worker account by exploiting a chain of weaknesses that trigger out-of-memory corruption, while the CVE-2026-109619 stale global state vulnerability enables unauthenticated heap use-after-free, memory disclosure, and remote code execution with the web worker's privileges.
PHP has released emergency updates that fix two critical flaws in the language itself, letting an attacker without an account run code on a web server. The fixes are in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, and the PHP team says only updating fully protects a server. The flaws, together called PHP2Shell, sit in the PHP runtime, not in any application, so a site is exposed even when its own
CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 are Critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a scripting language used globally for web servers and CMS systems. The post Threat Brief: Critical Vulnerabilities in PHP: CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619 appeared first on Unit 42.
Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of
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