r/technology • • 12h ago

Security New PHP vulnerability means the Internet will have a very rough couple of days

https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/10/21/new-php-vulnerability-means-the-internet-will-have-a-very-rough-couple-of-days
2.7k Upvotes

280 comments sorted by

966

u/Single-Virus4935 11h ago

This will be way worse than log4shell, which is still a problem, as sooooooo many php servers are plain unmaintained and also php is used on maaany wrbinterfaces for devices like.routers, firewalls, IoT etc. which will never see an update ever. Log4shell was more enterprise and not that ubiquitous like php.

176

u/CalebKrawdad 11h ago

That was a terrible Christmas on-call though.

43

u/Single-Virus4935 10h ago

Yep, I am soooo glad that I don't have any public facing php or java anymore.

Just go and rust with tight validation on http requests.

There was a German CCC talk or so where some vanish guy described how a WAF is dine correctly and I just only allow stuff I know I need and is safe.

Setup is also quite unique with gvisor as isolation etc. and people called me paranoid and hurting business.

Now, I have three employees working on projects while my former employer with 100 empl  I worked for as a CTO which CEO blocked any security in favor of velocity is completely offline right now, on a unmaintained php/laravel/WordPress/legacy php code with no clear upgrade path to the patched php versions.

All engineering is now dedicated to this now. 

I raised this issues for 6y but got no resources and eventually left. Was rough but I am so glad I don't have to deal with that anymore

3

u/tweelix 10h ago

Do you have a link to that talk?

10

u/Single-Virus4935 10h ago edited 9h ago

https://youtu.be/BOGUwO2kPLo

Edit: I don't remember if it was in this talk but force HTTP/2 between ReverseProxy and App because HTTP/1 is vulnerable to certain attacks where you can smuggle requests through the Reverseproxy because of parser differences which isn't a problem for the binary framed http/2 and 3

241

u/itzjackybro 11h ago

log4shell hit like every minecraft server when it came out

152

u/Single-Virus4935 11h ago

Yep, now imagine times a thousand.

There are firewall web interfaces coded with php and open to the internet. Like Juniper (v)srx, pfsense, fortinet etc.

Million websites, Next cloud instances, adservers, forums, .....

29

u/azsqueeze 10h ago

Wait next cloud runs on php? That seems like not a great choice of language for that kind of service

16

u/Accurate-Visual9793 7h ago

There has been a lot of effort put into making modern PHP not completely terrible. I still wouldn't choose it for a project, but it's not a complete liability anymore (other than well, these vulnerabilities)

2

u/AlleKeskitason 6h ago

I don't know much about what's baked into various programming languages, but wasn't php at least in the past considered a goddamn awful language by many? I just have this really vague memory of reading something about how the syntax or built-in functions were very extremely hacky or primitive or something, like they were designed by people who barely knew how to code.

9

u/itzjackybro 6h ago

PHP has syntax sugar that is specifically tailored towards web dev (like being able to embed directly into HTML, and something something builtin MySQL support?).

From what I remember, the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack was also huge back in the in the 2000's and early 2010's, and was like the recommended way to do simple websites at the time.

But I do agree, its syntax is about as horrid as it gets.

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u/tommyk1210 3h ago

PHP 4.x and 5.x was awful. That what people mostly have memories of. But modern PHP 8.x is actually a decent language, especially with modern frameworks like symfony/laravel

2

u/gravteck 6h ago

Not a PHP guy but messed around with it 20 years ago, but it allows you to comingle presentation code with execution code. You could execute a python script on the server by just loading the page. If you know more about what's going on, and what data you could inject in the request, you have a potential exploit with remote code execution.

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u/DogsRNice 8h ago

I'm pretty sure it was discovered by people trying to hack into 2b2t (a Minecraft server) lol

51

u/no_one_likes_u 10h ago

Asus literally sent me a notification email this week telling me my router would no longer receive firmware upgrades 🤦‍♂️

35

u/Careful-Criticism645 9h ago

ASUS routers generally don't use PHP and by default they are not configured to expose the web interface to the internet.

3

u/Bro0k 6h ago

How about TP-Link?

3

u/no_one_likes_u 8h ago

That is excellent news! thanks!

7

u/Single-Virus4935 10h ago

Since yesterday my health insurance APP doesn't work anymore. I bet the back end is php based lol.

1

u/chipperpip 3h ago edited 2h ago

We're probably going to have to start doing mass automated vulnerability exploitation for the purpose of forced patch deployments at some point, or even bricking devices if they're part of an active botnet and don't have an effective patch.

I think that's been done a couple times in the past for really critical stuff by getting individual court orders, not sure whether it's worth it yet to get some laws changed to make it routine, but I could see it reaching that point (also, federal cybersecurity agencies aren't in the best place currently, due to certain idiots in power).

738

u/thefuckevengoingonan 11h ago

arbitrary code execution on any website that runs PHP versions 5 through 8

very rough day

484

u/xFlumel_ 9h ago

For context, that means any version released between 2004 and yesterday

245

u/DogsRNice 8h ago

The people who run websites that haven't been updated since 2003 are probably feeling really good now

56

u/RegularNormalAdult 7h ago

That would be 4chan.

22

u/UltraNoahXV 7h ago

A lot of Wikis and older sites too for any topic. Heck...the government depending on where you are.

39

u/PartyWithRobots 6h ago

Actually 4chan is down as well apparently lol

https://i.imgur.com/ysebx1w.jpeg

15

u/red286 3h ago

That'd be me!

I actually started panicking when I first saw these reports because I am stuck on an ancient version of PHP due to legacy hardware and OS. I've been working on reworking everything to run under the latest version of PHP, but it's slow going, and there was no way I'd be able to get the new version out by tomorrow.

Then I saw that it affects versions 5.4 through 8.5.11.

Which makes me kinda glad I'm stuck on 5.3.2.

18

u/pittaxx 2h ago

Well, your systems are only missing 23 years of security patches. I'm sure you're fine...

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u/Maximum_Overdrive 5h ago

Hopefully my myspace page is not having issues

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u/snklznet 11h ago

Wordpress users in shambles

106

u/HeurekaDabra 10h ago

This is really interesting to follow.
Feels like half the internet slowly goes down while the news still spreads and developers franatically scan their projects just to find some php in old corners of their solutions nobody touched for years.
I'm so glad right now. My company had to take down one single server that is also just a backup.
Other companies in our group had to take down their products completely.

23

u/Single-Virus4935 9h ago

Dont forget appliances e.g. IoT, Routers, Firewalls.

Fortinet,  junioet and many others usw PHP for webinterfacea, captive portals and apis.

8

u/aurumae 4h ago

The really scary one imo is for small businesses who have a web presence but aren’t big enough to have any full time devs maintaining it. Like say you are a small press RPG publisher and you have a website and a forum that you paid some guy to set up for you fifteen years ago. They may not even hear about this issue or realize that it affects them, let alone have the know-how to update PHP.

194

u/linux_transgirl 10h ago

When are they not?

46

u/ItsOkILoveYouMYbb 10h ago

uh my company's internal bullshit and networks currently in shambles

1

u/pedanticPandaPoo 5h ago

Don't visit pornhub today 🫣

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u/MaxRD 10h ago

Couple of months, more likely. The vast majority of exposed and vulnerable sites are managed by people who will not be aware of it until after they get compromised

39

u/ILOVECOCKSTARGAMES 8h ago

If someone hosts a site how do they get their info compromised from this? And will there be data leaks on other sites members?

94

u/tommyk1210 8h ago

This is basically an exploit that allows an attacker to perform remote code execution (RCE). That is one of the worst exploits you can have.

An attacker, under certain circumstances they can induce, can basically get a full “shell” (terminal/command prompt equivalent) on the target server.

This means they can, for example, tell the server to send all credentials on disk to a remote server, or find the database password somewhere on config/disk and login to the database, then dump the whole thing to some remote server.

It’s bad.

20

u/MrTastix 6h ago

Yeah, I am a member of forums which haven't been active in years but are still around for prosperity reasons.

There's no good way to contact the hosts of these people to let them know, that's how inactive it is. The admins likely already know about this given their professions but they have to still remember all the projects they worked on 15 years ago with PHP to go back and fix it.

23

u/tommyk1210 6h ago

Nah, plenty of these admins were teens setting up web forums in the 2000’s, that was me too. Some, like me, will have made a career of it but just as many are happy to pay the modest hosting fees and have zero real idea what they’re doing.

3

u/Atario 2h ago

prosperity

Posterity, unless you're implying more than I thought

3

u/peeinian 4h ago

They can just open a reverse ssh connection and peruse your server directly.

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u/lilB0bbyTables 2h ago

Even the ones that are aware are going to have struggles. The patches will only be applied to latest PHP version … plenty of old sites are running older PHP 5 - 7 and have done so because the cost/effort to migrate is expensive. If they want to mitigate these vulnerabilities they are going to need to migrate, which means going in and updating a bunch of dependencies, running all their tests and/or manual smoke testing, fixing all the inevitably broken stuff, then rolling out those deployments. For many folks and teams, that could take days/weeks which leaves them sitting ducks unless they have the liberty of taking their software offline.

3

u/ToiletSeatFoamRoller 1h ago

Yeah we’re relying hard on the virtual host memory options and Cloudflare to protect us in the meantime. It’s been a scary day making sure that’s all airgapped (as much as it can be). Yes I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for two years that something like this was going to happen, now they have to prioritize it.

2

u/lilB0bbyTables 1h ago

Stakeholders/management failing to grasp the financial risks associated with not paying down technical debt - the tale as old as time. Rather than paying it off up front, or even a little at a time, now they get to pay it with interest.

At every org I have worked for, I have kept an internal wiki page dedicated to aggregating a list of technical debt that I was aware of (and encouraged others to co tribute to that page). I always keep a nice table along with it to identify each item in a row alongside a column giving a rough estimate on effort to address it and another assessing the overall risk associated with it. I have found that other folks appreciated it and more importantly, it has proven to be effective in getting green lights to schedule it into sprints to go ahead and pay some of it off iteratively.

67

u/dyzioslaw 6h ago

Worth stressing for anyone running WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop etc.: this is in PHP itself, not a plugin, so keeping plugins updated or running a security plugin won't save you. No login needed either.

What I'd do today:

  1. Back up first (files + DB, or just snapshot the VM)

  2. Update to 8.5.12 / 8.4.27 / 8.3.36 / 8.2.35. On shared hosting, ask your host if they've rolled it out yet. If you're on Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL, don't panic if `php -v` shows an older number. Distros backport the fix, so check the package changelog for the CVE IDs instead.

  3. If you really can't update today, the advisory lists a few temporary settings (`session.upload_progress.enabled=0`, lower `post_max_size`). They help a bit but they're not a fix.

And if you're still on 8.1 or older, there's no upstream patch at all, so it's time to move. As someone said: it's better to have broken site than a hacked site...

I put together a longer guide with commands for apt/dnf/Docker and the hosting panels if anyone needs it: https://szympanstudio.pl/en/blog/critical-php-vulnerability-update-your-server

18

u/icoder 6h ago edited 6h ago

> And if you're still on 8.1 or older, there's no upstream patch at all,

That's not entirely true. Ubuntu has released updates for LTS's back to 14.04, which runs php 5.5.9. You need Ubuntu Pro for that, but that is apparently free up to 5 machines, rather easy to set up and after that it's just `sudo apt-get upgrade` (edit: apparently THIS patch requires a legacy add-on to pro which is NOT free, *sigh*)

2

u/dyzioslaw 6h ago

I think that this issue is severe enough that older php versions will also get some patches, maybe not official ones, maybe just ported using ai - but they will.

103

u/BufferUnderpants 9h ago

First time I've seen Wikipedia down.

The article doesn't give many details, but this is a pair of memory-related remote code execution vulnerabilities, there are fixes for PHP 8 but it's not clear to me if it's only PHP 8 that's affected.

https://github.com/NCSC-NL/php2shell

54

u/Single-Virus4935 9h ago

Php5-8.

I know many orgs still on php5 and they have no clear upgrade path.  Tech debt might break many necks this time

16

u/Lywqf 8h ago

A clear example as to why tech debts can be delayed but not forever tho

6

u/LexGarza 8h ago

Damn, we had to jump from 5 to 8 in the summer. It was disastrous. On the bright side (for us), we were on the latest

2

u/Single-Virus4935 8h ago

That is why I like go. Code from 2015 still compiles with minor changes (1-2 breaking changes).

21

u/pissingtoxicspores 9h ago

I'm like, a normal person on the internet, is this like a "go offline for 2-3 days" type of thing? Do I need to update all my passwords everywhere? How do I know what websites are safe or not?

29

u/morgrimmoon 9h ago

For most large affected websites, it'll be a "website might go down for a day or two while it gets patched". Wikipedia is huge and constantly targeted by criminals (and some governments), so they're going to cop it much worse than others will.

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u/super_aardvark 8h ago

The vulnerability isn't a risk to you directly. Any site that's down right now is doing the right thing, and you can probably trust them once they come back up. Plenty of sites are completely unaffected by the vulnerability (because they don't use PHP), so no problem there.

If any sites do use PHP and don't go down at all during this, there's a chance they could be hacked. Unfortunately, it's tough for a layman to tell these sites apart from the ones that don't use PHP.

If a site is compromised, then the risk to you depends on what the hacker wants to do (no fundamental difference from past website hacks). Publishing your username and password for the compromised site, or other data the site has about you, is the most common thing that could affect you. The strength of your password would determine how quickly it gets published (if at all), and if you're using the same password on other sites then that would be bad.

I don't think there's any reason to go offline for 2-3 days. Maybe avoid entering your credit card on small mom-and-pop e-commerce sites. (Do those exist?) Anyone with a half-competent IT department knows about this and is taking it seriously.

10

u/Laevatienn 8h ago

It can take a few hours, depending on how big the site is, how much testing they do before brining them back up, etc.

For reference, a lot of media sites in Japan went down around 22:00 PM JST and are back up 2-3 hours later. Some are still working on patches. So. Really depends.

One of the factors is the current used PHP version at each site. Jumping from 8.5.11 to 8.5.12 (fixed version) should be pretty straightforward. Jumping from a super old version, like 7.1.5 (nobody should be here), to a 8.5.12 might break things and require more work.

Another factor would be how well the site/company has built their dev to testing to making the site live process. The better the setup, the faster it goes. The more manual steps, the longer it will take.

3

u/LGBTQLove4Ever 6h ago

Keep in mind: you don't need to be on the latest version, 8.2 and above gets the patch

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u/comicsnerd 9h ago

Bug is from code back in 2008. So a lot of old obsolete PHP versions are impacted too.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 6h ago

I was wondering why my whole university domain was down today. Guess this probably explains it. I wonder if yesterday's Google Cloud/Revolut outage was related?

2

u/BufferUnderpants 5h ago

I don't know about Revolut, but Google doesn't use PHP, they've always been very strict from the top down about their technology choices and they only use a handful of languages.

49

u/deweydm 9h ago

Forum I visit regularly hosted on Cloudflare shared this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/php-vulnerabilities-waf-protection . "Cloudflare successfully deployed multiple mitigations for all its customers while the vulnerability was leaked before the official release date and we observed attack traffic targeting our customers."

209

u/Stargost_ 9h ago edited 8h ago

You know shit is bad when Rule34, Wikipedia, and the Steam Store are all down simultaneously.

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u/Yaggamy 8h ago

MyAnimeList is also down for "potential security risk".

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u/EngRookie 6h ago

but how will i jerk off to random characters in games from my steam library while reading about quantum chromodynamics now🥺?

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u/Visible-Task-2798 4h ago

Damn if only I had the same IQ as yours in order to jerk off to characters in my steam library.

147

u/Lousy_Username 10h ago

This is going to cause a lot of disruption. I've already seen a ton of sites that have taken themselves down until they can patch.

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u/lovehopelove 10h ago

do you have a list of sites affected or perhaps an article listing some? I am finding very little information on what major sites are affected.

25

u/comicsnerd 9h ago

Half the government sites and los of NGO sites in the Netherlands are down. Many wordpress sites are down.

A patch has been provided for PHP 8.2 and up, but many servers are not up-to-date and will have a rough month to upgrade and then see what sites fail.

62

u/Thongasm420 10h ago

4 chan is in read only. X videos premium not working :( truly a sad day

157

u/RyghtHandMan 9h ago

I can't help but infer things about your life from these examples

96

u/executive313 9h ago

A man who willingly posts that comment is beyond your judgement sir.

39

u/webternet 8h ago

Dudes name is thongasm

52

u/Thongasm420 8h ago

plz dont leave out the 420 part its really important to my identity

13

u/webternet 7h ago

Im so sorry bud

8

u/EngRookie 6h ago

"IT'S A PIMP NAMED SLICKBACK YOU HAVE TO SAY THE THE A PIMP NAMED PART TOO"

2

u/nashbrownies 3h ago

Is that a Mission Hill reference!?

"Ahhhh, so this is legitimate massage!"

Edit: Boondocks actually I think

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u/taurusApart 8h ago

Right but maybe that's his surname?

Maybe he comes from a long line of Thongasms?

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u/webternet 7h ago

An unbroken and Neverending line of thongasms

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u/Shabuti3 7h ago

Thongasm, son of Girdlegoon has a LotR sort of ring to it

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u/Thongasm420 9h ago

go for it brother

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u/linux_transgirl 10h ago

Anything running mediawiki should be down if the webmaster knows whats up, with the exception of Wikipedia as they have mitigations in place for this sort of thing iirc

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u/Lousy_Username 9h ago

Looks like Wikipedia is down now as well.

4

u/linux_transgirl 9h ago

It seems that anything that isn't cached in some way is down. Clicking around the homepage and seeing were the featured article take me will sometimes give me a page but otherwise it doesn't

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u/Aggressive-Hawk9186 9h ago

lmao the most critical websites out there

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u/gin_and_toxic 2h ago

It's estimated that 70% of web is on PHP.

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u/Single-Virus4935 9h ago

My health insurance APP/Website is in maintainance mode since yesterday. Some sites are just displaying 403 or simple refuse connections. My former employers services and websites all show 403 and I know the php and update  situation is pretty bad.

I bet Claude will have to work through a mountain of legacy php code the next days just to be able to upgrade to the patched php versions.

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u/bryansj 11h ago

I'm stuck with two Joomla v3 sites with obsolete theme packs breaking migration. These need to be put out of their misery.

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u/palk0n 11h ago

what is this? 2008?

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u/SouthernAddress5051 10h ago

hey now, Joomla v3 didn't come out until around 2012. I wish I didn't know that.

9

u/wthulhu 10h ago

I guess Drupal was too advanced

4

u/pircio 9h ago

drupal fucking sucks

1

u/Atario 2h ago

Pfft. I wish

-6

u/[deleted] 10h ago

[deleted]

9

u/casualti21 9h ago

No idea why you’re getting downvoted. I have a Wordpress blog, I’m not a web developer. I used Codex to migrate everything to EmDash CMS. It literally did everything, from planning the migration, to theme development, to actually deploying the new site.

Many new CMS platforms are built for this workflow. EmDash is one of them. AI agents will do the vast majority of web development in the future. No point in painstakingly hand coding CSS and HTML or basic plugins.

5

u/HeurekaDabra 9h ago

Never forget, when everything is designed, prompt the LLM to 'now make it look less like AI did it'.

oprahyougeta.jpg: And you get traffic light indicators! And you get traffic light indicators! And you...catch my drift.

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u/Wetbug75 8h ago

I wonder if we're going to read stories in the next few weeks of people discovering rogue AI agents that have used this exploit to install themselves on various servers. They could even patch the exploit behind them, possibly remaining undiscovered indefinitely on some old systems nobody checks.

Scary stuff.

12

u/fleetingwords 6h ago

Web servers wont have the hardware to run frontier models. Not even close. They could install other apps, use them as bulletin boards, or backup their code though.

4

u/iamthe0ther0ne 6h ago

Guess what? 

 "Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. "

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

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u/Odious_Otter 5h ago

Source someone other than a source that relies on stoking the fires of AI for business.

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u/MrMagicMarker43 8h ago

I have a small web game, that is hosted on one of those free website hosting sites. It uses php for the users input and connecting to the database. Is this something I need to patch, or is it something the web host will patch? I am not savvy in this area so I don’t know if this is a problem for me or not

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u/Bullfrog_Paradox 8h ago

Contact your webhost

13

u/VictorVogel 8h ago

Yes this is likely a risk. It sounds like there is no important info on that server that someone might want to steal, and it is almost certainly running inside some container, but someone could basically take control of it and use it for their own purposes.

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u/Small-Cash-5119 7h ago

Hope he hasn’t got a high score table that’s going to get rinsed

3

u/gin_and_toxic 2h ago

If this is a fully managed hosting, they are responsible to do this. You can send a support ticket to ask about the status.

Otherwise it's your full responsibility.

4

u/yuusharo 7h ago

Yes. Absolutely. Contact your host provider asap for information on what actions you need to do.

This is a serious issue. Don’t put this off.

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u/Migamix 9h ago

consumer rights wiki updating now. yeah, im seeing some broken internet signs here and there. 

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u/linux_transgirl 10h ago

This with the compromised certs earlier mean the past 24 hours are likely to replace heartbleed as the worst day in cybersecurity history

12

u/MidgetRodeoClown 9h ago

The fact that a Sectigo AAA cross sign cert is part of the exploit for the cert stuff is mindnumbingly bad.

10

u/bron_101 8h ago edited 7h ago

Finally managed to get the patch deployed everywhere and services reenabled... what a shitshow. Various repos and mirrors getting flooded with requests and timing out made things worse.

I do think that the whole responsible disclosure process needs rethinking in the AI era. How long do we have now until AI agents start using new attacks? 15 minutes? It takes longer than that for patches to get seeded through mirrors, let alone actually deployed. We were ready and waiting for the patch and it still took us an hour or two to get it fully deployed.

When you get these kind of remote RCE in major very widely used services, I'm starting to think the only safe thing to do is shutdown services until patching is done. Before you could rely on attackers needing to get human eyes on the patch, figuring out the problem and spend a while writing exploit code. Now you can point your local unrestricted llm AI agent at PoC code and disclosures, and within minutes you have automated attacks going - worse, automated attacks with intelligence that allows figuring out maximum damage/value and chaining to other targets.

Lets not even talk about what happens if you get leaks that even vaguely hint at the issue, people send their AI tools to find the issue, and either partially (like today) or completely find the issue before a patch is even available.

Damn this has been a long day.

6

u/ecptop 8h ago

I have a audiobookshelf server tunneled with cloudflare so I can access if from any browser. Also shelfmark the same way. Do I need to do anything or am I at any risk

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u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 8h ago

No, Audiobookshelf is JS and Shelf mark is Python. Neither use PHP.

Edit: Of course, it's still best practice to have your stuff up to date regardless.

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u/ecptop 8h ago

Appreciate the information and reply. Thank you.

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u/Psychostickusername 9h ago

I've got some self hosted stuff that i access through my own domain. Media servers and apps for private and family use. Does this affect them or do I need to do any thing?

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u/LostMyConcentration 9h ago

If they run php, or things like wordpress that use php, and are open to the internet aka usable outside of your network, it can affect you. If not, you're probably safe

19

u/FIFAfutChamp 9h ago

If you are using Seerr, Aarr stack and Plex you are fine. None of these use PHP.

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u/christoy123 8h ago

Although Plex had a similar cve very recently so make sure everything is up to date

6

u/Important-6015 7h ago

Yeah if you’re using plex, say hello to plex2shell

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u/MaxRD 6h ago

The fact you run stuff exposed to the outside and have no idea if it’s using PHP is a problem of its own. I would recommend you turn it off until you figure out what you are doing

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u/ajnozari 9h ago

any php deployed on a version prior to today’s is vulnerable and needs to be updated.

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u/yawara25 9h ago

It depends. Does any of it run PHP?

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u/Psychostickusername 9h ago

I'm honestly not sure, a lot of them were setup in docker, I do keep them up to date though so guess I best go through the containers and check. Thank you

5

u/morgrimmoon 8h ago

Go through your containers and update them this weekend. The big ones are if you have MediaWiki or NextCloud, their Docker containers are definitely affected. Plex is currently being hit by a separate exploit, so update that too. Wordpress, if you use it. Those are the big ones needing patching ASAP.

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u/marvinfuture 9h ago

By self hosted do you mean you are accessing via a public IP or your private internal IP while on the network. If it's public, you need to remediate, if private, you'll at least have some protection, but it would still be recommended to remediate

2

u/WolpertingerRumo 7h ago

Just run updates if you run it on metal. If it’s docker, run them tomorrow, when everyone has finished integrating the security updates.

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u/Evening_Expert_6222 9h ago

You should probably be able to answer this question yourself if you're going to expose self-hosted services to the internet.

2

u/Hayden2332 9h ago

Is any of it exposed to the internet?

1

u/Psychostickusername 6h ago

Yes, albeit behind Https and login pages rather than just exposed web pages

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u/WindowlessBasement 5h ago

The vulnerability walks right through "login pages". The issue is how the server processes the request before executing the PHP code.

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u/irritatedellipses 9h ago

Do you run Pelican or Pterodactyl for game serving? Both of those are php based.

Nextcloud iirc. Drupal. Bookstack.

I haven't started digging in to what the issue is mind you, I'm just thinking of self hosted php based things I ran in the past.

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u/chefborjan 9h ago

Same for me, but connecting via Tailscale so I think I’m okay? 

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u/jared_number_two 7h ago

Low risk. But non-zero.

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u/staythewaters 39m ago

So long as you know for sure no one with Tailscale is on your tailnet, then this seems like a low risk. Nothing is ever a straight "yes you'll be okay," but in terms of what is actually exposed here, I'm not going to freak out on my containers that I have on my tailnet. Everything is pretty well locked down and I'll run the updates I need on my server tomorrow.

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u/TwiceInEveryMoment 4h ago

If any of them run PHP then I would assume yes. I had to take a couple of my self-hosted sites off the internet until the patch is available.

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u/djamp42 10h ago

Been patching all last night and this morning

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u/Neryuslu 10h ago

What? The patched versions have only been released 1 hour ago.

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u/NoPossibility4178 10h ago

Those are the public patches, fixes for this have been pushed out for a while now, issue is that the CVE got leaked.

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u/tommyk1210 8h ago

Yeah, public release was meant to be tomorrow, but the CVE got leaked

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u/SqeeSqee 11h ago

I keep seeing news about this. But I am very computer term illiterate. Even eli5's are too complicated. Why is this only affecting EU and not US?

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u/TheOwlMarble 10h ago edited 8h ago

It's not just the EU, but an EU group made a comment on it.

ELI5: all PHP servers versions 5-8 can be fully taken over with trivial effort from anywhere in the world due to a 9.2/10 severity vulnerability. A patch exists, but PHP servers are often very old and may not be maintained, so a lot of these servers are about to join botnets or be ransomed.

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u/SqeeSqee 10h ago

Whats the difference  between a PHP server vs a regular server? Why would they join a botnet? Is it because a bot can just hijack the servers now? If they get hijacked is it too late to update them with the fix?

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u/SubmergedSublime 10h ago

Server is a general term for a computer listening to the Internet, and waiting to respond when someone asks for something (“serving it” if you will.)

You can code that server in literally any computer language. It just has to be able to listen for web requests: no one else cares what language it is written in provided it can listen and serve.

PHP is a very common one, and was especially common in past decades. Which is a reason this bug is especially hard: it impacts a lot of servers and hardware that were written ten years ago, still exist, but haven’t been maintained or updated in years. Or are maintained, but rely on other old stuff so they can’t easily be updated as that stuff breaks.

So “PHP servers” is a huge chunk of the internet connected world. (Python, Go, and JavaScript are other super common languages for servers. They all the same basic tasks. Each language has its pros and cons for the ease of developers, but the end result is effectively the same from the outside)

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u/TheOwlMarble 10h ago edited 9h ago

A server is just a computer that takes requests from other computers and responds to them without human intervention.

There are several programs that can do the actual request processing. PHP is one of them, powering up to 80% of servers. NodeJS (common for a lot of modern websites) is another. As this is an issue with PHP, NodeJS servers are untouched.

As for botnets, it's common for state-sponsored hackers to quietly take over vulnerable servers and then use those servers at a later date to attack other computers. Private hackers may also use botnets to mine crypto or could just use this vulnerability to hold servers for ransom.

Extricating an infected server from a botnet is often doable if you have physical access, but some are very very hard to expel and may require wiping the hard drive.

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u/BufferUnderpants 9h ago

To add, PHP is the underlying software of some very widely used applications, notably Wordpress, which is used to display the blogs and webpages for private individuals, small businesses and local government agencies all over the world.

A copy of Wordpress running on some version of PHP has been set up to run hundreds of thousands of times independently, by unrelated people, as it was the cheapest option available to have a webpage like this.

The underlying computers will be left exposed by this vulnerability, as it allows attackers to run their own code in them.

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u/datskinny 10h ago

PHP servers are web servers that host sites made with PHP. But PHP is not the exclusive language to write webpages in, so there are other servers hosting those. Once compromised, joining botnets is just one of the use cases.

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u/Thepumpkindidit 10h ago

Is it possible for someone to use this exploit for good. As in use the vulnerability to take over a website and upgrade the PHP for them?

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u/xchaibard 10h ago

Update? Not really.

Just Take the server down so that someone notices it's vulnerable is probably the best option.

Whenever someone asks me at work what an unlabeled, apparently ignored server does or who owns it, or if it's even still being used, I tell them to just turn it off and see who shows up. If no one shows up in a week they can decommission it because it's obviously not being used for anything important lol

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u/BorgDad42 9h ago

Ah, the time tested "Scream Test". Turn it off and see who starts screaming

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u/oddsnsodds 10h ago

Remote updates that disable your connection after the update can be disastrous

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u/ShadyGuyOnTheNet 8h ago

Well if it wasn’t being cared for anyway, better dead than bot net.

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u/DiamondIceNS 9h ago

Theoretically, sure.

In practice, updating a major version of PHP like v7 to v8, or way worse, v5 to v8 (v6 was skipped, it's a long story) is not trivial. If you upgrade the PHP version, but your website uses old-style code that the newer version of PHP ripped out for being outdated, your site just breaks. Ask me how I know...

I suppose you could, if you were so inclined, have an LLM auto-migrate the problematic code. But now we're out of cheeky benevolent white hat hacker territory and into "idiot hacker dumps buckets of money on strangers for fun" territory.

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u/DragonSlayerC 7h ago

Why is it not a 10?

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u/TheOwlMarble 6h ago edited 6h ago

PHP self reported it as 9.2, but watchTowr has disputed that, calling it a 10. As I understand it, the discrepancy is based on disagreements of how easy it actually is to cause the memory corruption issue.

I'm inclined to believe the 10 because PHP has known about this since 2024 and didn't deal with it, in part, because they themselves couldn't figure out how to attack it, demonstrating that they are not the best judges of this.

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u/00DEADBEEF 9h ago

so a lot of these servers are about to join botnets.

It's worse than that. The exploit gives an attacker a shell, so they can run any command, which means exporting data such as the entire database, or file uploads in private systems, is very easy.

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u/Stilgar314 11h ago

Who says is only affecting EU? 

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u/grekster 11h ago

It affects everyone

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u/kwartel 10h ago

It’s affecting everybody. The most simple explanation: most websites use a programming language called PHP. Every version of that language released in the last 20 years has an issue where with a rather simple trick, hackers can access the server the website is running on. Once they are inside, depending on further measures the people setting up the server took, the attacker can access customer data, or change the website.

See this like finding out that the most popular door lock has a neat little trick which takes you 3 seconds to lockpick any door in the world. But because this is the internet, you also can be at the front door of every house in the world in milliseconds

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u/PM_ME_SAD_STUFF_PLZ 10h ago

You basically described the fob locks that most new apartments have that allow for the lock to be open via a paper clip into the weep hole

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u/WloveW 10h ago

Good to know. When all the apartment lock apps get bricked everyone can still get in! Well maybe not good everyone can get in...

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u/11711510111411009710 7h ago

Ah, well that's terrifying to learn.

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u/comicsnerd 9h ago

US is just waking up.

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u/xxhybridzxx 8h ago

Holy crap, this is a bad few days in tech. Plex, TLS Certs, and PHP

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u/poy_esp 7h ago

Docplanner and other similar patient booking systems have struggled for years to modernize their PHP stacks and have failed. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to rethink moving away from PHP completely. Sounds expensive.

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u/NotTheHeroWeNeed 2h ago edited 2h ago

I maintain a few dozen websites across multiple servers. All I had to do was update to the latest php patch, and restart the service on each server. It took about 5min to do with basically no disruption. This is potentially serious, yes, but I feel this story is being blown out of proportion.

Edit:- seems I’m just lucky because I’ve kept all my sites up-to-date and and running php 8.2/8.3 

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u/tyda1957 2h ago

It's an RCE affecting most of the internet. Not sure how it could possibly be "blown out of proportion".

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u/WannaBeHappyBis 1h ago

Lots of sites do not have (proper) maintenance.

Others are stuck on olders PHP versions because of a huge variety of reasons.

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u/ToiletSeatFoamRoller 2h ago

Cries in 7.3 legacy app

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u/MedicatedApe 1h ago

Cries in Rocky 9

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u/Annual_Berry8043 1h ago

I can confirm that it was not a good time at work today.

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u/No-Security9332 10h ago

Would Plesk be affected? As in, Plesk itself?

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u/Ozzie-Isaac 7h ago

Just got patched on wow private servers lmao

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u/nmay-dev 7h ago

Does a debian apt update patch this?

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u/waterkip 4h ago

Yes, on bookworm (deb 12) 8.2.35 is deployed. 

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u/untamedtony 8h ago

Would my dental site be effected

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u/OkCommuter1997 6h ago

Your hosts should sort out the patch. Make sure your site/wordpress or anything using php is 8.4 and above to receive the patch. 

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u/platinumarks 10h ago

Security flaws? In my PHP? It’s exactly as common as you might think.

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u/Individual-Result777 8h ago

Good, I need money, maybe my clients will call me. :).

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u/kvothe5688 8h ago

seems like gemini argon found two vulnerability and new update of PHP for fix

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u/kell96kell 7h ago

So any updates?

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u/Carlton_LeBoss 6h ago

Is this why the TF2 wiki is down?

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u/sk1nnyjeans 4h ago

Is this what Plex warned all of its server hosts about?

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u/robophile-ta 3h ago

No, that was another exploit.

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u/MedicatedApe 1h ago

And nodejs today too

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u/andy3172 58m ago

Can someone ELI5 for me please?

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u/Black_Handkerchief 39m ago

I wonder if Synology will change its stance on whether my DSM needs upgrading to 7.3 since its automatic check has been on its current 7.0-whatever since forever. I hadn't realized until today that it was being held back for upgrades because Synology deems it safe enough... but every single PHP version my 7.0 DSM version apparently 'supports' predates PHP 8.

What the hell is the point of a NAS if upgrading every package/os to the latest supported versions is not even being offered? I found out I need to mass-update my DSM this weekend, lose half the stuff they don't support anymore because of license shit, probably break some other stuff I've got going on the network & webserver side, and generally will not have a nice weekend in the slightest.

For now I've disabled every PHP engine on the custom website profiles I've got in there, but that's about all I can do. I'll just have to hope the handful that are still up make it very hard to identify the PHP entrypoints.

I knew I wasn't on the latest-latest version, but I figured that whatever I was running was at least in a maintenance period still.

Screw you, Synology. I don't get the idiot that decided it was a good idea to hide updates for older NASes by default!

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u/GrubbyViper382 23m ago

A game i play, path of titians has shut down their servers due to this. Possibly up to a week owner of the game said there's up to 35 vulnerabilities and they have only fixed 2 so far

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u/watever194 4m ago

Wonder if this is finally the time some of my old clients from 10 years ago email me to upgrade. Code from a 20 years old me was definitely spaghetti.

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u/All-I-Do-Is-Fap 2m ago

“Couple of days” lol the fact that a lot of ppl think this is an issue means they live in a bubble