606 pointsby ejohnso49 7 hours ago303 comments

Related ongoing thread: PHP 8.2.35 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180873 (links to more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184935 )

Discussion

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cubefox · 7 hours ago
Sounds like a lot went wrong, the 2024 issue not being patched and then multiple parties leaking stuff before the scheduled release date.
petecooper · 6 hours ago
>On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is 9.2). No technical details leaked. This was partly me. I take responsibility for posting it on HN. I am truly sorry for the disruption this has likely caused. My contact had informed me there was no embargo, and told me her contact had told her the same. It transpired this morning that was a lie. >On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure. On the plus side, at least I'm not Chainguard. Yikes.
dannyw · 6 hours ago
> As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. This is the most surprising part to me. It sounds like Calif saw the leaks, interpreted that as embargo being broken, and then raced to publish their [anime dancing] marketing video? I'd have expected much better.
- yreg · 6 hours ago
  This is not the dancing anime girl video, is it?
  - atymic · 6 hours ago
    That's the one
- bombcar · 6 hours ago
  This is EXACTLY how marketing/pr firms actually coordinate no matter what they SAY.
- xp84 · 6 hours ago
  mistakenly? This reads like some guy tripped and fell on top of his mouse and in so doing, accidentally turned on screen recording, performed the exploit a few times, got the anime girl asset and soundtrack, dropped all of them into Premiere, added the weird effects, rendered the video, and published the video to Twitter. "Ow. What did I fall on? Oh noooo, I broke the embargo!" Heck of a mistake.
  - RamRodification · 5 hours ago
    Your comment is funny. But obviously, "mistakenly" refers to the mistake of believing the embargo being broken, and then, very intentionally and not mistakenly, publishing a stupid video.
    - thayne · 3 hours ago
      I bet they had the video already made, the mistake was publishing it too early.
      - wredcoll · 3 hours ago
        That's literally what they just said??
  - MallocVoidstar · 4 hours ago
    That video was published 4 hours ago by lcfr_hax, the embargo ended four hours ago. Was it posted earlier and then deleted or something?
    - 0c3ca83 · 4 hours ago
      That video ended the embargo. If someone releases a video telling you how to run an embargoed exploit, it's not an embargoed exploit any longer.
      - chinathrow · 4 hours ago
        That's not how embargos work.
        joebonrichie · 4 hours ago
        de jure de facto
      - MallocVoidstar · 4 hours ago
        The embargo was announced for Oct 21 14:00 UTC: https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-20-1 The video was posted 44 seconds before that time: https://x.com/lcfr_hax/status/2112906567662399830 This can't possibly be interpreted as some major violation of the embargo, so what are people talking about?
        Georgelemental · 4 hours ago
        The video was posted hours early, quickly deleted (but not before being reshared), and then posted again at the proper time. The link in your comment is not the first release of the video
        nicce · 3 hours ago
        It was posted yesterday 24h before and then deleted.
  - tclancy · 2 hours ago
    Definite candidate for the next "What Did We Get Stuck in a Twitter Video this Year?" list.
  - any_throw777 · 1 hour ago
    reminds me of the guy that dials in to the mullah, asking "hey, I fell on plate of shwarma and ate it, what should I do now?" some people are just lacking coordination
- lenerdenator · 4 hours ago
  This is your brain on anime waifus.
bowersbros · 6 hours ago
Step 1: Ensure that docker images are available when the embargo is released. We're 2 hours in, and they still aren't available.
- thinkindie · 6 hours ago
  today I learned that building your image from scratch is fundamental in cases like this. Luckily I came prepared thanks to Claude Code suggestion.
- eqmvii · 6 hours ago
  Yep, all our efforts are now focused on working around that. It's pretty neat!
- Droobfest · 6 hours ago
  Never using docker hub ever again
- lol768 · 6 hours ago
  The PHP Foundation should manage it, the Docker ""Official" Images" approach clearly just doesn't work properly for responding to vulnerability patches.
- emilburzo · 6 hours ago
  I can empathize with them, this is actually quite difficult when you're an open source project. You have your source code public, so you can't commit/push because then you've leaked info. Your build pipeline is also likely public, so you can't just build from another source code... source. You can create a private repo, but now you also need to build a private build system. You don't get the same generous build resources for private repos, so you either: a) simplify the build to just the essentials b) pay Unless you have significant funding, you'll probably go for a). Now you have to maintain two systems, also with some differences between them. Plus you need a way to get the build artifacts from the private system to the public one, typically at a fixed point in time. Any failure/delay (e.g. less powerful build on private repo, errors because you exercise it rarely) causes people to get upset that you didn't respect the announced time. Maybe you're also using things like image attestation, another can of worms.
  - modeless · 6 hours ago
    Making a cloud CI/build/release system whose behavior can't be reproduced locally requires some kind of brain damage. I can't believe people tolerate this.
    - emilburzo · 5 hours ago
      That's... not what I said at all? But let's go with that scenario, now you have all sorts of problems, from practical to security, like: - accidentally/maliciously building the wrong thing? there's a patch, people agreed to it, but the wrong commit is built - building for multiple architectures/versions? - signing keys on someone's laptop? - worse, image push/write keys on someone's laptop? And so on.
      - modeless · 5 hours ago
        The problems you describe in your first post are only problems when you can't reproduce your build process locally. With a local build you can always do it in private for free. The problems you bring up here are eminently solvable too. Yes there are many solutions for building for multiple architectures and versions. Cross builds, containers, VMs, or just having more than one computer locally. You can address building the wrong thing with reproducible builds, but for a one off patch like this it's not the most likely problem and relying on a trusted maintainer temporarily during an emergency is better than waiting for a glacially slow cloud build while exploits spread. Pushing builds to the cloud is inherently a cloud step, so it's fine to leave keys for that in the cloud, but there should be a process for publishing local builds and it should be essentially instant when the build is already done. You should always have a local build process that replicates CI. There is no excuse.
  - cobolcomesback · 5 hours ago
    Those are all challenges that surely need to be overcome! But they had _two months_ to figure out how to overcome them. For them to not have figured out a solution and have pre-built images ready to push as soon as the embargo lifted is ridiculous.
    - dofm · 2 hours ago
      Did they have the money and the people? PHP is chronically underfunded.
  - inglor_cz · 5 hours ago
    I'd say that for someone like PHP, in this era of AI-driven vulnerability/patch race, having a private CI/CD pipeline is a necessity. PHP is written in C, I'd be surprised if similar problems didn't lurk in other places. Maybe they will construct the private pipeline after this crisis. Millions of websites are probably now waiting for all the downstream Docker images to be built and pushed.
    - emilburzo · 5 hours ago
      The images everyone is waiting for are built by Docker though? So now if you're Docker you have to have a private CI/CD pipeline with all library projects? It would be great, but it's also something to manage. Just keeping it working with all the changes that happen across all projects would be something.
      - inglor_cz · 5 hours ago
        All library projects, certainly not. But the top 1 percent by usage/downloads, I can imagine, and PHP probably qualifies into that top slice.
  - yangm97 · 4 hours ago
    A private build followed by a manual push would take literally two commands and could be done from a maintainer’s laptop… it is not rocket science.
    - Leherenn · 3 hours ago
      I don't know about PHP, but at work our artifacts are signed, and you certainly cannot have the signing certificate on your laptop. It's stored in some secure server, and only accessible from some allowlisted build nodes, for specific builds (release branch, ...). Now of course, there are ways around that if required, but they are, by design, manual, cumbersome and slow. I could not create a release build locally in a few minutes. A few hours maybe if the whole organisation dedicated itself to it.
      - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
        Setting up all that for single man project might be a hassle but for any sofware with actual dev team I wouldn't call it hard to do. I'd worry more about the fact that essentially publishing binary-first means that it ever gets compromised that makes it easier for attacker to smuggle exploit using "this is security update" pretext.
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    Linux Kernel approach of "just publish fix without fanfare" seems to be least compromising way to do it. Every bug can be security bug
- fguerraz · 6 hours ago
  I find it incredibly naive that they’d hope it would not leak after weeks/months of embargo. Being given advance notice of an upcoming security fix is an immense privilege, organisations should turn around quickly when given such information, they shouldn’t be given more than a couple of days to update IMHO, it’s not like the rest of the world can wait.
  - Scaled · 6 hours ago
    Keep in mind that some of the organizations are presumably patching ancient versions of PHP like 5.6. I am sure this is a process which takes considerable time, especially as upstream PHP has washed their hands of such old versions and the downstreams are effectively on their own. (It is often much cheaper for an enterprise to just get a long term support contract than to properly upgrade to a modern PHP stack.)
    - dylan604 · 4 hours ago
      > (It is often much cheaper for an enterprise to just get a long term support contract than to properly upgrade to a modern PHP stack.) I've experienced similar to this. I know I shouldn't be, but I still get amazed every time I hear that some small company is still using an old DOS machine running core software based on dBase that nobody has any clue on how works and the developer has since moved on to a higher plane. One person told me that they sweat every time the power goes out longer than the attached UPS can run holding their breath that the machine powers back up.
    - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
      That... just makes it so their tech debt turns into entire world's security problems. 5.6 is unsupported. There should be not getting special treatment just because they have massive tech debt
- kyriakos · 6 hours ago
  Aren't those run by docker? php foundation cannot be responsible
  - berkes · 3 hours ago
    PHP foundation also doesn't "Run" the apt or rpm packages, yet they certainly coordinated with debian, and other big distros to push the updates out timely. Now I don't know what happened here. Maybe PHP foundation reached out to docker but got no help, maybe they simply forgot about docker as distributor of their software.
- dofm · 4 hours ago
  FWIW, Docker images are a nice-to-have, but OCI containers are not how most PHP users get their PHP. For all the long-tail users, PHP is a distro package. That route needed the most work instead, and it got it.
  - berkes · 3 hours ago
    There's over 3 million downloads per month for the official PHP image. That may certainly not be "most PHP users". But still is a a lot of users. I'm quite certain that your exact sentiment is why the images weren't updated immediately: I'm afraid PHP foundation doesn't see docker images as a particularly important distribution system.
    - dofm · 2 hours ago
      > I'm quite certain that your exact sentiment is why the images weren't updated immediately: I wouldn't be that certain. I think it's likely that the vast majority of PHP Docker image downloads are for local development, for one thing. But nevertheless, it would not come close to the number of websites running PHP from the Ubuntu Server packages. It is absolutely right that the effort was focussed on the distribution route. Because PHP is not "expert" hosting territory; it is still more often whole cloud VMs running the distro packages.
nicce · 6 hours ago
What is the penalty of breaking the embargo? Not shipping patches anymore beforehand?
- dannyw · 6 hours ago
  It might make other projects reconsider sharing advanced patches with Chainguard.
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    Nothing's gonna happen, just as with previous embargo breaks, people complain yet nobody involved gets punished
- xyst · 33 minutes ago
  A mere digital slap on the wrist via "bad publicity".
ernubufiei · 6 hours ago
> On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. This is incredibly damming of Chainguard. I struggle to see justification for this, even with the chaos approaching the coordinated release.
- blantonl · 6 hours ago
  This single-handedly assures that I will never, ever do business with Chainguard or any member of its C-suite executive team.
- yreg · 6 hours ago
  They (is it the CEO?) commented on it earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735 In their place I would worry that this was the last time anyone shared an embargoed build with them.
  - dannyw · 6 hours ago
    Let's hope so. Shall we create a new norm? A 365 day timeout, for companies like Chainguard that deliberately break embargoes. Very irresponsible behaviour in my opinion; and if it's a decision made unilaterally by their CEO, probably a breach of their SOC 2 certification. What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix, don't worry, we're making this free!"
    - cryptonym · 6 hours ago
      I think multiple companies didn't respect the embargo, in different ways. That can be for marketing purposes or by mistake. Not sure how to deal with that.
      - dannyw · 6 hours ago
        A security vendor entrusted with advanced patches breaking embargo, is much worse than a security researcher breaking embargo.
      - martinjc · 6 hours ago
        Chainguard effectively held everyone hostage, and forced everyone hosting container images and wanting to be online, to trust their builds and then saying they did it for "free" to get free advertisement. Incredibly irresponsible behavior. They used this as a big fat advertisement board. Dont trust us with information lol.
    - cobolcomesback · 6 hours ago
      Nah, Chainguard should be praised for this. It was a different company that leaked the POC early, and then PHP, Wiz, OpenAI, and Calif sat on their hands doing nothing while the vuln was being actively exploited in the wild. Chainguard did the right thing by getting the fix out as quick as possible to stop the bleeding (or gushing flow of blood, really) rather than sitting on it so they could make a coordinated marketing post, like the others did.
      - kstrauser · 5 hours ago
        That's a reasonably take. Embargos only work until the information's leaked, and once that's happened, however it happened, the bad guys have the exploit information and the clock starts ticking.
        chrisvls · 4 hours ago
        PHP’s view is that Chaingiard started the clock because the video was insufficiently detailed. Not sure if that is the case, but just sharing I had a different reading of the statement.
        eterm · 4 hours ago
        It was being discussed on here hours prior to the Chainguard release.
      - kijin · 5 hours ago
        But did they "get the fix out"? They released some binaries, built for their own docker image based on their own Linux distro. Other people couldn't use Chainguard's "fix" to patch their own systems. The only people who seem to have benefited from the stunt are the hackers who used AI to reverse-engineer the binaries and write exploits. That was a giant fuck-you to the rest of the PHP ecosystem, nothing more.
      - gruez · 5 hours ago
        >... Wiz, OpenAI, and Calif sat on their hands doing nothing while the vuln was being actively exploited in the wild. What was Wiz/OpenAI supposed to do? PHP was already aware of the issue.
      - bawolff · 5 hours ago
        > It was a different company that leaked the POC early, [citation needed] By which i mean, this seems untrue. If you mean the anime video, that is not a leak of a PoC.
    - jamietanna · 3 hours ago
      > What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix [...]" https://www.chainguard.dev/athena https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/this-shit-is-hard-build...
- Grollicus · 6 hours ago
  Not sure if this [1] comment is from them? Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735
  - gjsman-1000 · 6 hours ago
    So if I'm understanding correctly: 1. There was a leak of the pre-announcement 2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral 3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild [Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead 4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early 5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.
    - ebilgenius · 6 hours ago
      Or maybe the anime girl video was an edit someone else made on top of an otherwise normal Calif video. Still not great though.
      - gjsman-1000 · 5 hours ago
        Unbelievably the anime girl video was the official version from Calif. https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
        keketi · 5 hours ago
        The video got taken down by a copyright claim from Sony Music Entertainment. Unthinkable levels of unprofessionalism by Calif.
    - mirashii · 6 hours ago
      > 3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.
      - danso · 6 hours ago
        That same user wrote a followup tweet last night asserting that their POC wasn't ready to do an exploit in the wild https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137
      - bawolff · 5 hours ago
        Which seems to be someone bullshitting with AI and had nothing to do with the exploit in question.
    - Hamuko · 6 hours ago
      Not really sure if 3 is correct. Might have been Calif leaks the video -> it goes viral -> people make PoCs based on the video -> Chainguard releases the binary because there seem to be credible PoCs out there (that are not just the Shigure Ui video).
- john_strinlai · 6 hours ago
  if their comment in true (linked in sibling comments), then it's really not damning. typically an embargo is ended when someone leaks early or it's being exploited in the wild. so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.
  - ebilgenius · 6 hours ago
    If they're gonna unilaterally release an exploit patch 6 hours before an agreed upon embargo for a CVSS 9.2 that affects like ~70% of the internet then they better have reams of evidence showing this was being exploited in a widespread manner and not just "we saw a dancing anime girl edit of a theoretical exploit on twitter, so we had to release it to the world"
    - b112 · 6 hours ago
      And evidence they at least gave a heads up to everyone in on the embargo, eg "I have to release you all have 1 hour to get on board". There is a MASSIVE difference between a small number of people exploiting in the wild, and a few hours after a release a bazillion script kiddies doing so. The move to release and break an embargo was childish, absurd, self-serving, and lacking in all common sense. Not to mention, breaking trust. I agree with those in this thread who say, never going to do business with them. Ever.
      - richwater · 5 hours ago
        > Not to mention, breaking trust. I highly doubt their paying customers feel the same way
        b112 · 5 hours ago
        A weird take. As a customer, I'd immediately assume no one in the security community would trust them again, and seek someone else to give my money to. Why pay a) an untrustworthy company who b) now is not trusted by anyone and c) won't ever be able to early release again anyhow? And if anything, are left out of important conversations. Way to burn bridges. You only get to be an asshat once.
        richwater · 4 hours ago
        > You only get to be an asshat once. TIL observing an exploit in the wild, after the details leaked during the embargo and pushing a fix for your customer is "being an asshat".
        dylan604 · 4 hours ago
        > You only get to be an asshat once. I have seen no evidence to back up this claim. Quite the contrary actually.
        yardstick · 5 hours ago
        Maybe, but if I was maintaining PHP or another critical software, I’d think twice about letting Chainguard have inside information. I would let Chainguard deal with the patches post official release like all other unreliable parties.
    - lenerdenator · 4 hours ago
      It's the age of LLMs. Exploits go from theoretical to real fairly quickly. PHP's open source, it's not impossible to conceive of someone seeing that video, getting the general idea of what to do, and working the rest out with a decent model.
- arm32 · 6 hours ago
  Brain rot is making us incompetent, dangerously impatient, or a mixture of both.
- skrrtww · 6 hours ago
  I dunno, the post is awfully critical of Chainguard for leaking a fixed binary 6 hours early, but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic (not to mention spawning millions of agents crawling the php codebase and trying to brute force a POC and probably using more energy than a lot of countries in the process).
  - john_strinlai · 6 hours ago
    i keep seeing mentions of the video, but is it still available anywhere?
    - Hamuko · 6 hours ago
      https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944
    - bcvvvy · 6 hours ago
      https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944 Song is Petite Meller - High Forever (Marlon Hoffstadt Remix). Which is annoyingly catchy
      - john_strinlai · 6 hours ago
        wow, okay. yes, that really does look like a "my first PoC" video made by an early teenager. hard to believe that this was produced by a company that wants to be taken seriously. thanks.
        bcvvvy · 6 hours ago
        Any idiot can create their own company. For example, I have one :)
        unsnap_biceps · 5 hours ago
        they claim 60 full time employees
        quietsegfault · 5 hours ago
        Any idiot can work for any idiot that starts a company!
        b112 · 6 hours ago
        I wish people would name this idiotic company, I can't see Twitter here and all people are talking about is a childish video they made. I don't ever want to do business with said company, ever. They're apparently not trustworthy, and behave as children.
        john_strinlai · 6 hours ago
        calif.io
        Hamuko · 6 hours ago
        It's Calif. They're named in the post. > As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities. You can see the same demo video on their site: https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
        sippingabonedry · 5 hours ago
        If anything this is further justification for why these patches need to be kept under wraps. This industry is full of immature children who cannot keep their mouths shut for 24 hours. They have no clue what massive coordination this requires.
        yreg · 5 hours ago
        These 'immature children' have discovered the exploit, so good luck keeping it under wraps from themselves.
        numpad0 · 4 hours ago
        There do seem to be the perpetual problem with the field of computer security that only insufferable and immature kids matter, due to discrete math adjacent nature of computer science, and yet they also legitimately can't be trusted, or does it not... unless LLMs do change everything.
        kps · 3 hours ago
        The management class is certainly itching to ditch the remaining nerds.
      - numpad0 · 5 hours ago
        That gif is a segment from Shukusei!! Loli Kami Requiem by Shigure Ui, the illustrator-VTuber-singer, FWIW... 1: https://youtu.be/Ci_zad39Uhw?t=15
    - cpa · 6 hours ago
      https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/cache/media_...
      - arm32 · 5 hours ago
        Definitely archiving this, lol.
      - tonyhart7 · 5 hours ago
        lmao, these are funny af
  - cubefox · 6 hours ago
    > but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic They took it down but someone (Kirill Firsov: https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944 ) added the anime stuff and reposted it. Totally irresponsible. Edit: okay he didn't add the anime, but he reposted it.
    - debugnik · 5 hours ago
      The company, Calif, has it with the music, effects and Ui Shigure animation on their own website and youtube channel: https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
      - fatty_patty89 · 5 hours ago
        what's up with the obsession of these people with anime children?
        numpad0 · 4 hours ago
        dopamine junkies crave stimuli, and realistic details of humans are just noise for the data. anime humans are simplified to extremis which alone makes some people think it's about kids
      - quietsegfault · 5 hours ago
        good god that video is absolutely horrible. why is stuff blurred then the same blurred stuff is suddenly all visible? nothing changed.
        dylan604 · 4 hours ago
        it's called creative licensing. you can't account for taste though.
      - tetha · 5 hours ago
        I think I'm too old for this industry I want to go back to talks by bored defcon guys or gals calmly stating how they obtained private keys of a globally trusted CA with just a bit of math. Which, mind you, ate the other part of the teams time. Now I know how much I hustled today likely due to that atrocity of a video. I think I will take a vacation day and sit in a forest near a river on friday.
  - corford · 6 hours ago
    Agree. If I'm following along correctly, it seems Calif is really the one to blame not Chaingaurd.
    - yardstick · 5 hours ago
      Both are to blame. Calif more than Chainguard, but still Chainguard too. Calif was obviously twitching to claim credit for their findings, and what I find troubling is this eagerness was more important to them than giving users a chance to update their systems. Even if they ended up waiting only a day post release I would still say it seems a bit too soon. Maybe a week after. Not everyone’s system have aggressive patching schedules and PHP is soo heavily used.
      - kjs3 · 4 hours ago
        This is probably the future, tho. Being first to disclose a vuln is a Big Deal in some quarters. And now, the velocity of AI driven pentest swarms mean every researcher who finds something worthwhile has to think "how close is the next droog's swarm to finding what I found" and the temptation to jump the gun only gets stronger.
  - bawolff · 5 hours ago
    The video has no usable details in it. It's maybe not professional to release an omg panic video, but not even remotely the same thing as what chainguard did.
    - numpad0 · 4 hours ago
      there were security guys publishing inferred details from [INFO] messages, it did contain more than zero usable details
      - bawolff · 3 hours ago
        Everything i saw on twitter prior to the release turned out to be incorrect. At most people figured out it had something to do with session upload handler and UAF, but nobody knew what.
    - dylan604 · 4 hours ago
      I don't know, it's showing most sites being pwnd in less than 20s with some taking just under 30s. Of course, that's on homeboy's local Mac. Not sure how long it takes to gain control with PHP2Shell to run the exploit though. Just started looking at that part myself
      - bawolff · 3 hours ago
        So, just because they showed they can doesn't mean they showed how. I dont know why the timing of the bug is surprising to you.
- tflinton · 6 hours ago
  I kinda get Chainguard's position here. They were part of the embargo, saw exploits hitting in the wild already and decided to release rather than hold things back. Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.
  - dannyw · 6 hours ago
    Did they actually see exploits in the wild? The PHP Foundation team disputes this, and say they didn't observe any working PoC capable of an exploit.
    - gjsman-1000 · 6 hours ago
      Chainguard most likely interpreted Calif's dancing anime girl video as a script kiddie who had found a POC.
      - dannyw · 6 hours ago
        It sounds like there was no "co-ordination" behind any of this co-ordinated disclosure. You'd have expected there to be an IRC channel, a mailing list, a Slack chat, or something for something of this scale. Was there even an incident co-ordinator here? Was any of the parties talking to each other?
      - arm32 · 5 hours ago
        Can you blame them? Calif's unbelievably unprofessional video's leak definitely spikes the cortisol of any actual professional.
      - SiempreViernes · 4 hours ago
        And then decided to not ask the PHP foundation about it?
    - danso · 6 hours ago
      The person who wrote the widely-referred-to tweet last night (claiming to "have recreated & lab/field tested CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619") followed up a couple hours later and said that their POC had not been proven to work "in the wild" [0] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263 [1] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137
      - bawolff · 5 hours ago
        As far as i know they lied and are now retracting their claims. What they posted was not consistent with the details of the real bug.
      - nicce · 5 hours ago
        The whole post looked to be vibecoded and the code did not even match the claims
    - skrrtww · 5 hours ago
      Cloudflare's blog post announcing its updated WAF rules directly implies the existence of in-the-wild exploits: https://blog.cloudflare.com/php-vulnerabilities-waf-protecti... "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." If that's not an in-the-wild exploit, it literally couldn't have been further away than one or two more iterations.
      - snowwrestler · 5 hours ago
        Attack traffic doesn’t necessarily mean the attacks were, or would have, succeeded. From Cloudflare’s perspective, there is no downside to saying what they observed, and deploying defenses. We may never know if this was actually being successfully exploited prior to patch availability.
        charcircuit · 1 hour ago
        You shouldn't wait until the attacks succeed to start deploying defenses.
      - bawolff · 5 hours ago
        That sounds like cloudflare trying to reassure paranoid customers. I think its a reach to go from that statement to actual in the wild exploits.
  - rskeens · 5 hours ago
    Many people actively following would have 403'ed multiparts so people seeing those blocked might have assumed it started being exploited early instead of probes / background noise.
- andix · 1 hour ago
  There were signs that others broke the embargo too. Public (this one video everyone is talking about), but maybe also non-public. There were some rumors going around which part of PHP was affected. That was enough for some people to figure out the vulnerability. But it's also possible, that some attackers got non-public inside information. If the embargo is already broken in a meaningful way, it suddenly becomes much less clear if it is still in place after all. Emphasis on >less clear<.
ChrisArchitect · 6 hours ago
Related: PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836 Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181175 Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172041
ck2 · 6 hours ago
serious question for legacy systems, how difficult would it be for an attacker assisted by "AI" to stage the conditions on a scale of 1 (easiest) to 10 (hardest)
- TZubiri · 5 hours ago
  What do you mean by stage these conditions?
- riddley · 5 hours ago
  0. Seriously.
- Titan2189 · 3 hours ago
  You forgot to say "Asking for a friend"
- Cthulhu_ · 1 hour ago
  Given the exploits are literally out there, 0.
charcircuit · 6 hours ago
>Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. >This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure. Good. Coordinated disclosure meant that people couldn't protect themselves. That's not a good thing. It meant sites were forced to shut down instead of simply updating.
- S0y · 6 hours ago
  You need to pay to get access to chainguard images.
  - lrae · 6 hours ago
    They made them available for everyone and free in this case. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735
  - blantonl · 6 hours ago
    That is incredibly damaging to the trust that coordinated vulnerability disclosure depends upon. The obvious consequence is that Chainguard should never again receive embargoed fixes in advance. You don’t get invited back into the room after demonstrating that you can’t be trusted with the information. They didn’t get to unilaterally decide that the embargo was inconvenient and publish early.
    - charcircuit · 3 hours ago
      Why do you place a higher priority on maintaining coordinated vulnerability disclosure than of the safety of actual users of the software being protected?
  - john_strinlai · 6 hours ago
    not the ones related to this
  - tflinton · 6 hours ago
    No, you don't, you just don't get older patched versions unless you pay.
- BHSPitMonkey · 5 hours ago
  No... Uncoordinated disclosure meant that attackers were suddenly armed with detailed information about an already-hyped severe vuln hours before the majority of downstream consumers had the means to patch their systems. Maybe your calculus could hold if Chainguard's registry were the primary distribution mechanism for PHP in use worldwide (such that the benefit of an updated image would at least be widespread compared to the sitting ducks relying on the other repositories), but it isn't.
  - charcircuit · 2 hours ago
    If the sites are taking no action they will be vulnerable no matter when the patch is released. For the people who do take action before chainguard's release the safe option was to just turn off your server (and let any big competitor site stay up and take your traffic since they got the patch ahead of time). People taking this option will be offline until a fix is available for them to use. They are not in danger of being hacked. Trying to say that uncordinated disclosure is bad because people might get hacked yesterday instead of today just is not a convincing argument to me. I prefer the solution that results in the minimum amount of downtime for sites and sites provide value to society.
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    I will nitpick on that, if it was just released as a patch, there wouldn't be a hype to begin with, just point update to apply. I'm just gonna assume patch was ready for a while and the wait time was just letting big players to update their own stuff before it is available for the public, and at that point it is just making the rest of the internet second class citizens not "worthy" enough to get the update quicker.
lol768 · 6 hours ago
> The PHP security team closely monitored and inspected appearing PoCs after the leak but did not identify any functional exploits at the time of release/public disclosure Okay, but how close did they get? Were they close enough that a determined actor could've (perhaps using an LLM) managed to get to a functioning exploit?
- Grollicus · 6 hours ago
  I know of a php exploited about 4 hours before their release time 1400 UTC, using the session bug in an exploit that was passed around. I'm really not very much in the loop about cyber security things.
- bawolff · 3 hours ago
  I saw two on twitter, they were both pretty far away.
bombcar · 6 hours ago
> The PHP security team, operating on consensus, struggled to choose between these and feared the repercussions of shipping the wrong choice. This is the real story. You ship one of them (the breaking change) with —fuck-my-shit-up or something as a compile time option to switch to the other fix.
fg137 · 6 hours ago
> Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. > Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images ... Won't be the last time this happens. If there is no consequence of breaking the rules, people will keep doing that.
- chrisvls · 5 hours ago
  I’d say getting called out like this is a consequence.
  - eviks · 4 hours ago
    So people will keep doing that
- Tepix · 4 hours ago
  Perhaps Chainguard will be the last to receive the next bug report.
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    Given how security moguls are handling that, we should go back to "just release it, consequences be damned". Coz that gets normal people better chance of actually fixing it
- semiquaver · 4 hours ago
  That sounds oddly threatening, especially given that chainguard is in the right here. Embargoes are stupid in 2026 and make no sense. The rumor of this issue was enough for it to be independently discovered by several white hats and almost certainly many threat actors.
  - nicce · 3 hours ago
    > Embargoes are stupid in 2026 and make no sense. The rumor of this issue was enough for it to be independently discovered by several white hats and almost certainly many threat actors. The point of the embargo was to prevent all rumors? But it did not hold.
    - streetfighter64 · 2 hours ago
      Releasing a statement that a critical security bug exists with no more information, does the opposite of preventing rumors. I think one of the most surefire ways of generating rumors is to say "something big will happen tomorrow, please don't speculate about it". Anyway, GPs point is that even if nobody leaked anything, and the only thing publicly known was the existence of the bugs, people would anyway have been able to find them independently. So what is the purpose of waiting 24h before releasing the patches?
- kbenson · 2 hours ago
  What are these "rules" you speak of? There's usually nothing binding in these agreements. It's just groups either trying to do the right thing by end users or trying not to look like assholes, get a better payout, or some combination thereof. Finding an exploit and publishing is is not against the law. In some cases, publishing immediately is the responsible thing to do. For example, when it's actively being exploited in the wild, and waiting just puts people at risk that don't have any recourse to protect themselves, since they don't know they're at risk. There can be nuance to that as well, but in general, as soon as it's being exploited, anything that makes it harder for end users to a) know there is an exploit, or b) tell if they're susceptible to it (e.g. through a POC) is just taking away people's ability to take the action they deem appropriate.
cubefox · 6 hours ago
The guy who posted the CVE IDs early: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50183326 (dead comment)
redox99 · 5 hours ago
As long as PHP is written in C, it will be insecure. It sounds cliche but yes, they should rewrite PHP in rust or other memory safe language.
- cute_boi · 5 hours ago
  And, i don't understand why we are still using PHP. Agents can use Rust or go directly and we get benefit of performance...
  - muspimerol · 5 hours ago
    Because like 30% of the websites in the world are on WordPress, and countless others in custom PHP? Not exactly a trivial task.
    - mbac32768 · 2 hours ago
      Claude please rewrite my entire WordPress site as an OCaml Mirage Unikernel that runs directly on bare metal, no Linux. I bet that takes a week at most.
      - system2 · 2 hours ago
        While at it, create a custom firmware for the BIOS to utilize the CPU more.
        Cthulhu_ · 1 hour ago
        In fact, design an FPGA that runs my wordpress blog about my stamp collection in pure hardware. Make no mistakes.
  - vaylian · 5 hours ago
    and the increased costs of maintenance of a code base that humans will be reluctant to read.
  - sevenzero · 5 hours ago
    Because its way easier to verify LLM generated code for Laravel over some Rust project. Or do you just vibe it and dont look at code anymore?
- TheJoeMan · 5 hours ago
  As long as programmers trust 3rd-party-provided content-length input, it will be insecure. At this point, I'm not sure why we even use content-length anymore since you're going to need to size your buffers based on the actual content.
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    Because when file finishes you want to verify whether the size matches. And for non-malicious content, you can drop file above the upload max limit before user wastes time sending the file.
- rectang · 3 hours ago
  I'm generally bullish on migrating C projects to Rust, but that will only reduce a particular class of vulnerabilities. There will still be other vulnerabilities which remain discoverable by LLMs, and for those, the problem of accelerated exploit creation will remain. I'm really not sure how you mitigate this issue, other than serving static HTML and reducing the attack surface to cut out dependencies like PHP.
- berkes · 3 hours ago
  There should be more interpreters or runtimes. Regardless of the language they are written in. Indeed a rustPHP, maybe a JPHP, cPHP, etc etc. There is zend, but AFAIK that's still using the "official" PHP under the hood. And there is or was hiphop. Not sure how that is going, though. Because now a vulnerability in PHP affects practically 100% of the users. But with more diversity, it would affect only a part. And if one runtime proves insecure more often than another one, organizations have a choice to move to an interpreter that better fits their security needs.
- pluc · 2 hours ago
  It's pretty popular in Go: https://frankenphp.dev/
adithyassekhar · 5 hours ago
It's interesting that even 4chan was taken down for over 24hours now. Responsible people there.
- yreg · 4 hours ago
  SomethingAwful too
  - doublerabbit · 4 hours ago
    DeviantArt as well
- otterley · 2 hours ago
  And nothing of value was lost.
miohtama · 5 hours ago
The old joke: The guide to PHP security: Use something else. The end.
dang · 5 hours ago
Related: PHP 8.2.35 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180873 - Oct 2026 (439 comments) PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836 - Oct 2026 (146 comments) PHP session.upload_progress heap UAF (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176077 - Oct 2026 (61 comments) Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172041 - Oct 2026 (631 comments) Tell HN: 2x PHP RCE CVEs with CVSS 10.0 Incoming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167754 - Oct 2026 (60 comments)
eviks · 4 hours ago
> 2024, PHP underwent its first external security audit > PHP security team, operating on consensus, struggled to choose What an unfortunate waste of a security audit. (and consensus is an obvious flaw in decision making) > PHP runs a large share of the web... Yet security work on PHP itself still depends on a small group ... Another unfortunate big structural issue that's unlikely to change. Are there structurally much safer ecosystems out there?
- gjsman-1000 · 4 hours ago
  Yes. They're operated by big tech and called C# or Java.
  - nradov · 3 hours ago
    While the main Java and .NET virtual machine implementations are much more secure than PHP, they were still written at least partially in unsafe C++. I won't be surprised if frontier LLMs eventually find more vulnerabilities in those platforms.
- barelysapient · 4 hours ago
  I wonder if that isn't a side effect of how its structured... When a corporation sponsors the language, such as Java, Go, .Net, there's an inherent economic component which acts as a forcing function. PHP being a foundation sounds nice. But consensus wasn't strong enough to affect the key outcomes.
  - rvba · 1 hour ago
    why nobody in foundation management was not intereated in resulta of rhe security audit? making php is the core of (checks notes) php foundation or is the management full of completely not technical people who use it to boost their CVs?
- redox99 · 3 hours ago
  Rust and go don't have a C backbone like PHP does. So they are inherently safer to these kinds of vulnerabilities.
  - rafram · 3 hours ago
    Garbage collection is also an option. Lots of backends on the JVM! (Of course there's Log4shell, but that could've happened to a Rust-based stack too, and might be more likely to, considering the proliferation of deeply-nested dependency trees full of tiny libraries in that ecosystem.)
  - barelysapient · 3 hours ago
    it's a good point. I wonder if we'll see a PHP fork and rewrite in rust. like tcrs. given the recently issues they would seem to benefit the most...
    - Cthulhu_ · 1 hour ago
      There are plenty of alternative interpreters or compilers out there already, no need to start a new one again: https://github.com/gakowalski/alternative-interpreters#alter...
- berkes · 3 hours ago
  > Are there structurally much safer ecosystems out there? Several attributes make a safer ecosystem. An important one is diversity - technical diversity. For an interpreted language, the runtime is important. Python has several runtimes, as does Ruby. Javascript also has several, from the few browsers, to node, deno and bun. PHP has for all practical purposes, only one. So if there's a security incident in PHP, it affects almost all users. But when e.g. JRuby has a vulnerability, it will affect only a fraction of the installed ruby applications. For compiled languages, the tooling, libraries and runtimes is where diversity is important. With e.g. rust, the vast majority of CVEs come from libraries (crates). But since there often are several crates for a single concept, diversity helps mitigate here too.
  - Cthulhu_ · 1 hour ago
    > PHP has for all practical purposes, only one. I know you added a caveat and all, but no, PHP has a number of alternative runtimes just like the other languages you mentioned: https://github.com/gakowalski/alternative-interpreters#alter... But again with all the ones you mentioned, they have a "core" runtime that the vast majority of production apps use, so if NodeJS has a vulnerability it would be just as big. The interesting one will be whether "boring" ports - like recently Typescript's TSC from Typescript to Go and now to Rust - will be safer for being the same code and logic, converted to another "safer" language (by transpilers or LLMs).
  - InsidiousWombat · 1 hour ago
    ...given amount of CVEs for Ruby that appears to not matter much
  - any_throw777 · 1 hour ago
    if there's a use case for re/decompiling, it's this one. with at least one strong alternative implementation, there would be less incentive on the attacking side to go all out on either PHP implementation.
maqnius · 4 hours ago
I was asking myself today; how to ensure that you don't miss a cve? I mean you'll sooner or later stumble across it if you're monitoring your communities but I thought that maybe there exists some kind of central solution, like a service were you could subscribe for your tech stack and get notified?
- ktbwrestler · 4 hours ago
  I may be misunderstanding this but think the hard part about building a threat intel feed like this is just trusting that the underlying integration would surface something you care about... especially if you want to DIY it. You can scrape HN, GitHub advisories, NIST, whatever you want... but you may give yourself a false sense of security after seeing the "all clear" checkbox each morning I hope that someone has some sort of a reasonable approach here / I would love to help work on something open source if not
- bredren · 4 hours ago
  I’m curious about this too, although I would somewhat hesitate to rely on that, except as a contributing point of information. PHP2SHELL, in particular, made me expand my weekly security review to include my external network resources. The natural conclusion for this seems to be realtime monitoring CVE and pre-CVE vulnerability indications in exposed stacks.
- jungturk · 4 hours ago
  Lots of licensed solutions have this (typically SAST or DAST tooling like Snyk, etc...). Given your build manifest/SBOM they cross-reference CVEs for vulnerabilities during/after build time. Some have free licenses, many don't.