PHP2Shell attacks have surged into the millions, but no successful exploitation is confirmed. Patch it immediately. On October 21, PHP released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS score of 9.2), affecting every PHP version that handles web requests. The bug code dates back to PHP 5.4 from 2012, lives in the PHP engine itself rather than in any application, and allows unauthenticated remote code execution via crafted HTTP requests. Cloudflare researchers observed tens of thousands of exploit attempts within 45 minutes of public disclosure, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions by October 22. Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) October 22, 2026 As of October 23, Censys counts over 34.4 million PHP services still running vulnerable versions. Governments, hospitals, and schools across Asia, Europe, and North America have preemptively taken services offline rather than wait. Below is an image showing the hosts potentially vulnerable to CVE-2026-109618 and/or CVE-2026-109619. Source Censys Security firms using honeypots report the same pattern: attackers are scanning many servers and trying to exploit the PHP flaws, but no successful remote code execution has been confirmed in real-world attacks. Sophos says this suggests that attackers are also struggling to exploit the vulnerabilities. Even its own security team needed more effort than expected, despite using AI, to develop a working exploit. However, the risk is growing. VulnCheck researchers have developed an exploit that bypasses ASLR, a security feature that randomizes where code is stored in memory. By combining both vulnerabilities, they can use a memory leak to bypass this protection and run code on the target system. The exploit works, even though there is no evidence of widespread use yet. The attempts that have been caught so far are mostly scanning, fingerprinting, and botnet delivery attempts. Cowrai’s analysis of PHP2Shell traffic in the wild found connections to a Mirai variant called Potassium, which contacts a C2 server, checks for an HTTP 200 response, then downloads a Linux executable as a follow-on payload. “The payload, a likely Mirai botnet variant known as Potassium, was not delivered since the exploitation attempt was unsuccessful due to being blocked by Sophos countermeasures.” states the report published by Sophos. “However, analysis of the sample revealed that is an updated and significantly expanded version of the Mirai-derived botnet variant identified in early 2026.” The malware can download additional files and disrupt networks. It contacts a hard-coded command-and-control server, checks that the server responds successfully, and downloads a file designed to run on Linux. If normal address lookup fails, it can use public DNS servers such as Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS. Like other Mirai malware, it can also launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Arctic Wolf found that both malware samples had Ethereum Name Service (ENS) resolution disabled, meaning the feature was available but not active. “ENS resolution was disabled in both samples, indicating that the capability was present but inactive.” states Arctic Wolf. “If enabled in future variants, it could complicate disruption by reducing reliance on registrars and DNS providers, requiring defenders to block the ENS names, RPC infrastructure, and resolved command-and-control addresses.” The botnet’s developers have already added the ability to use ENS to find command-and-control (C2) servers. This could help them keep their infrastructure online and make it harder for authorities to take down their domains, but the feature has not yet been enabled. Sophos blocked the attempted Potassium delivery before it succeeded. But analysis of the sample itself showed it’s a significantly expanded version of the Mirai variant spotted earlier in 2026, with added DDoS capabilities and fallback DNS resolution using public servers like 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 hardcoded as backup. PHP2Shell is being compared to Log4Shell because it affects a huge number of systems. The flaw is in PHP itself, so it can affect websites, content management systems and shared hosting services. Even a basic WordPress site with no extra plugins is at risk if it uses a vulnerable PHP version. Fixes are available in PHP versions 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27 and 8.5.12. Older versions, including 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, need fixes provided by their software distributors or an upgrade to a supported version. Cisco Talos notes that scanning for flaws and using public exploit code is easier than building attacks into custom tools. Advanced attackers may still be developing those tools, so administrators should use this time to patch vulnerable systems. “The true impact of this vulnerability will take time to evaluate.” concludes Talos. “These types of vulnerabilities that impact core technologies tend to cascade into other platforms and applications as they evaluate impact and provide associated patching, harkening back to the waves of exploitation that we saw after Log4J.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, PHP2Shell)
Cloud hosting provider Railway published an urgent warning to users after detecting suspicious activity on its systems that store customer environment variables earlier this week. The company says its investigation indicates that, in some cases, an unauthorized third party may have obtained decrypted variables and urges all users to proactively rotate secrets and credentials. “Our investigation to date indicates that an unauthorized third party may have accessed encrypted environment variables and, for some of them, obtained the decrypted contents,” Railway says. “Environment variables may contain secrets such as API keys or database and registry credentials,” the company clarifies. Railway is a cloud platform for developers to deploy and run applications, APIs, databases, and various backend services. It has around 4.8 million users and hosts more than 16 million services.
China-linked Storm-0940 used AI tool ARTEX to target 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants, exploiting stolen ConnectWise credentials at machine speed. Microsoft published a detailed technical report naming Storm-0940, a China state-aligned group, as the actor behind the ConnectWise Cloud Backup supply chain compromise. The group used ARTEX, an open-source AI-driven penetration testing framework, to run attacks at machine speed against hundreds of organizations across aerospace, defense, energy, financial services, government, manufacturing, and more. “Several of these Storm-0940 ARTEX-driven attacks have resulted in the actor obtaining privileged access to an organization’s cloud infrastructure – including multiple instances where the time from initial targeting to privileged access was less than 3 hours.” reads the report. “Microsoft assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multi-tenant application.” Storm-0940 has been active since 2021 and has historically relied on password spraying and OAuth application abuse to get into Microsoft 365 environments. Adding ARTEX changed the scale of what they could do. In some attacks, the time between initial targeting and achieving privileged cloud access was under three hours. Before obtaining the ConnectWise credentials, Storm-0940 launched a password spraying attack between October 10 and 14. The attack came from the IP address 144.172.64[.]99. Microsoft recorded more than 151,000 failed login attempts against 327 accounts at eight organizations. Activity peaked on October 11, with 2,900 failed attempts per minute. Forty-eight accounts each received more than 1,000 failed attempts. None of these attempts succeeded. The situation changed on October 15, one day after the ConnectWise breach became public. The AI agents stopped trying passwords and switched to a different attack method. By then, Storm-0940 had obtained the credentials of several ConnectWise cloud application accounts. The agents used these credentials to log directly into customer Microsoft 365 environments. “Storm-0940’s use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to Microsoft 365 customer environments through applications that had already been granted access.” Microsoft continues. “This allowed the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. “ The agents used applications that already had permission to access their targets. This allowed the attackers to enter customer environments without requiring users to sign in interactively. In a subset of environments where authentication succeeded, the agents didn’t stop there. They moved into Microsoft Graph and ran directory reconnaissance, modified application credentials to establish persistence, and attempted changes to identities, groups, and privileged roles. Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of this follow-on activity. The persistence mechanism is the part defenders need to act on now, even if they’ve already disabled the ConnectWise connections. “These changes can remain active as a backdoor even after the original compromised application is mediated.” says the IT giant. An attacker who added their own credentials to a trusted application before you revoked access still has a working key. Reviewing all service principal credential additions since at least October 1 is the right starting point, not October 15 when the public breach was announced. ARTEX is not a tool used only by Storm-0940. Microsoft says threat actors in several regions have used the same framework. Originally open-source, ARTEX was written in Go and can use different AI models to plan and carry out tasks. Researchers at Zscaler and Recorded Future also found a Chinese-speaking group using it to target South Korean financial institutions. The setup used DeepSeek, GLM, and Grok as coordinated AI agents, with GLM checking DeepSeek’s work. After these attacks became public, the project went closed-source. However, anyone who already has a copy can still use it. The speed point is what Microsoft keeps coming back to in its report. Agents don’t take weekends, don’t sleep, and can run multiple attack paths simultaneously. “This activity demonstrates how threat actors are integrating agentic AI into existing offensive security workflows and allows them to scale their operations exponentially.” Microsoft concludes. “Agents are not constrained by factors affecting humans – they can work around the clock, on weekends, and on holidays and attempt multiple breach paths simultaneously enabling significantly reduced time from selecting a target to achieving objectives, increasing the speed and impact of complex attacks like supply chain compromises.” When Storm-0940 had valid application credentials, they didn’t have to iterate slowly. They hit 2,250 tenants with 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace at which manual detection and response simply can’t keep up. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ARTEX)
Japanese gaming giant Capcom has confirmed that hackers breached its membership service, CAPCOM ID, exposing more than 11.7 million customer email addresses and associated information. Apart from emails, exposed data includes account creation date, last login timestamp, number of logins, and the IP address used at the last login. Capcom found that for a small subset of 43 accounts, dates of birth, gender, nicknames, and countries were also exposed. For another subset of 196 accounts, the hackers changed the CAPCOM ID login passwords in an attempt to lock the owners out, but the company took action and reset them. In an alert today, the gaming company says that passwords for all other registered members have not been exposed and that credit card information remained unaffected. Capcom is a Japanese video game developer and publisher known for franchises such as Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, and Mega Man. The company has 4,000 employees and an annual revenue of $1.24 billion.
Right now, there is probably an AI agent running on a laptop somewhere in your network. It stores API keys and database passwords, can access your internal systems, and works without anyone watching. Nobody reviewed its access. Nobody owns it. If an employee had that much reach with that little oversight, you would call it an insider risk. So why do we still call the agent a productivity tool?
Attackers are exploiting a zero-day SQL injection flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO), the central management system for VeloCloud SD-WAN networks, the company said in an advisory on October 22. The flaw lets anyone who can log in to the orchestrator, even with a read-only customer account, gain operator privileges, the top level of control over it. For
This week has already been rough for cybersecurity. Critical PHP and GitLab RCE flaws, serious Linux security bugs, compromised eMudhra certificates, a Node.js RCE flaw, a hacked LiteLLM release, and hundreds of hijacked Tor relays. That's a lot to deal with in just a few days. And the week isn't even over yet. But those big headlines are only half the story. Stolen passwords, exposed
Arista Networks released security updates to patch an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability affecting VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) On-Prem deployments. VCO is a web-based management portal that helps administrators configure, monitor, and manage VeloCloud SD-WANs (Software-Defined Wide Area Networks) and associated edge devices. Tracked as CVE-2026-114625, this critical-severity flaw can allow attackers with basic privileges, access to the VCO web interface, and a valid authenticated session to escalate privileges through low-complexity SQL injection attacks that don't require user interaction. "VeloCloud Orchestrator (VCO) on-prem has a security issue where this issue may allow a remote attacker to access privileged internal functionality and impact the VCO host. Successful exploitation may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the orchestrator and data managed by the orchestrator," Arista said.
Unit 42 explores modern OAuth threats and actionable steps organizations can take to protect their environments. The post The Current Landscape of OAuth Attacks appeared first on Unit 42.
AWS detected PHP2Shell exploit attempts four days before disclosure, highlighting the risk of attackers exploiting critical flaws before patches arrive. Attackers attempted to exploit two critical PHP vulnerabilities four days before the flaws became public, according to Amazon Threat Intelligence. “Amazon Threat Intelligence identified a PHP2Shell exploitation attempt dating to Oct. 17, 2026, in MadPot telemetry, four days before public disclosure of CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619.” reads the report published by Amazon team.”The exploit attempt originated from an IP address associated with a commercial anonymization network. While the vulnerability was under embargo, the targeting of a honeypot from an anonymized IP address suggests the activity was conducted by a threat actor, though it remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure.” The activity began on October 17, 2026, and appeared in telemetry from MadPot, AWS’s network of honeypots designed to attract and study malicious activity. The company said the first attempt targeted a honeypot from an IP address linked to a commercial anonymization network. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, were still under embargo at the time. AWS believes the use of anonymized infrastructure suggests a threat actor was behind the activity. However, the company hasn’t established how the attacker obtained information about the vulnerabilities before their public disclosure, nor has it confirmed that the early attempts would have succeeded against real-world systems. The first attempt wasn’t an isolated event. AWS detected multiple proof-of-concept exploits on October 21, with the earliest appearing at around 02:00 UTC, roughly 12 hours before the scheduled public release and patch at 14:00 UTC. Between 02:00 and 08:00 UTC that day, AWS observed further attempts against MadPot from additional anonymized infrastructure. The payloads and anonymization services varied, leading the company to suspect that multiple actors were involved. After the embargo ended and PHP released the fixes, more proof-of-concept exploits appeared within hours. AWS reported that attackers used them against its sensors almost immediately, describing PHP2Shell as being broadly exploited in the wild. The findings show why the date of a public security advisory can’t always serve as the starting point for an incident investigation. In this case, defenders had to account for activity that began before they could publicly identify the vulnerabilities. “The actual payloads and choices in anonymization infrastructure varied, suggesting these were multiple actors.” continues the report. “Technical analysis is ongoing, and it’s unclear if any of these attempts would have succeeded in real-world systems.” PHP2Shell refers to two critical flaws in the PHP runtime that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. An attacker may be able to send a specially crafted web request and run commands on a vulnerable server without first logging in. PHP published fixes on October 21. The corrected releases are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, according to the official PHP security notice. The vulnerabilities affect PHP itself, rather than a specific website application. As a result, updating WordPress, Drupal or another application won’t fix the underlying problem if the server continues to run a vulnerable PHP runtime. AWS says there is no configuration-only workaround that fully addresses both flaws. Organizations should install the fixed PHP version as soon as possible and check whether their hosting provider, operating system vendor or container image has supplied the necessary update. For systems that can’t be patched immediately, AWS suggests considering whether blocking multipart file uploads is practical. Administrators should assess the impact on their applications before applying that restriction, and they shouldn’t treat it as a replacement for installing the fixes. AWS recommends reviewing web server logs for suspicious requests, particularly POST requests containing the PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS string in multipart form data. Security teams should also look for unexpected processes launched by PHP and unexplained changes to files on web application servers. These checks matter because an attack may leave evidence beyond the original HTTP request. Unexpected command interpreters, newly created files or unusual process activity can help investigators determine whether an attacker progressed beyond probing a vulnerable endpoint. AWS also published six IP addresses associated with observed activity: 103.216.220.92, observed on October 17 31.223.184.166, observed on October 21 37.19.200.5, observed on October 21 134.209.159.64, observed on October 21 103.114.163.188, observed on October 21 95.217.98.37, observed on October 21 These addresses require careful handling. AWS warns that some belong to shared anonymization infrastructure and aren’t exclusive to PHP2Shell activity, so organizations should investigate matching events rather than automatically blocking every address. The Cloudflare analysis of PHP2Shell provides additional context. Cloudflare said it had deployed web application firewall protections before public disclosure and had already observed attack traffic targeting its customers, including attempts to change payloads to evade those protections. A web application firewall can help reduce exposure, but it doesn’t replace patching. Defenders should combine updated software with log analysis, process monitoring and checks for suspicious file changes. AWS draws a broader lesson from the incident: organizations shouldn’t assume that exploitation begins only after a vulnerability becomes public. The October 17 activity shows that attackers may obtain or develop exploit information while a flaw is still under coordinated disclosure. Attackers are using AI to develop exploits faster, sometimes within hours of a patch being released. Security teams need to patch critical systems quickly and investigate attacks from the earliest known date. For PHP2Shell, AWS recommends checking logs and activity from October 17 onward, including suspicious behavior that detection tools may not yet recognize. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, PHP)
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