PSA: PHP warns it plans to release 2 emergency patches imminently (today 14:00 UTC)
The set of vulnerabilities is dubbed PHP2Shell and disclosure is scheduled for 14:00 UTC with attacks expected to follow soon after.
It is adviced to take offline every non-vital services until the patch has been installed (or the Docker image has been updated with a patched version of PHP)
Update: fix is out https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-21-5
52 replies
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Wordpress sites suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Seriously though, how quickly do you expect patches to be available for WordPress? I've got one WordPress site that I made years ago for a friend's business. I pop in on it and update stuff every few months.
Should I take it down?
it's PHP that needs the patches. Yes you should take the site down until PHP has been patched.
edit: assuming you are hosting wordpress yourself. if you're using a large 3rd party service that manages PHP itself like wordpress themselves, one should hope that they will be updating PHP early, before the patch is even released publicly.
Yeah it's self hosted, thanks
depends. do you want to deal with a simple patch in 24 hours or do you want to rebuild an entire legacy system from nothing (assuming you don't take proper backups)?
How dare you (correctly) assume I haven't taken proper backups!
Jk lol
I do have a couple backups I made a few months ago. Never tested restoring them, so I don't count them as "real".
I'm hosting on namecheap servers, using their cpanel and stuff. So I don't have the option of installing my own PHP version, just selecting theirs.
But apparently they had some mitigations in place before updating, and then they got us updated.
it's a lot more than wordpress...
Shouldn't especially vital services be taken down to secure them?
Yep. Except if taking them down will kill people.
takes down 112 / 911 services
Don't worry guys, we're safe now! ꒰ঌ(˶ˆᗜˆ˵)໒꒱
Safe here, we use 999
round these parts we use 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
We're YOUR emergency services
I'll never remember that. I'll just send an email...
As if those are running anything as recent as php.
For their interactive mapview in the control room they probably do.
Me when I take down only one hundred twelve out of nine hundred eleven services, leaving seven hundred ninety-nine services still running
Nextcloud.
Mailcow.
Spare a moment's thought for the dev behind the ondrej PHP mirrors.
Could not pull shit from it this morning. I panicked because my distro's repos did not have the version numbers of the patched packages, but apparently the Ubuntu maintainers back ported the patches. Sigh of relief.
It's just one thing after another. I already had to make sure every computer and VPS has the updated CA certificates earlier today. Now I just finished disabling all of my web servers. I hope Debian doesn't take forever getting the patch out.
They took just a few hours to squeeze out a new ca-certificates. On the other hand the last time there was a huge kernel bug it took well over 24 hours I think…
A bad ca is update a file on every pc and application. A kernal bug is way more involved so it doesn't make a new problem later.
They took a lot longer than that on some past vulnerabilities, some of them sat unpatched for weeks or months. But it depends on the severity. A remote exploit of severity 9 will probably get expedited.
Why do it this way? I'm genuinely unaware.
With the plex2shell, they fixed it in a previous update, then told us later.
If PHP knows what the problem is, why announce it now, and then release the patch. Why not release the patch, say hey guys this is an important one, and then tell the world/every script kiddie who didn't know about php2shell AFTER everyone is patched?
Like I get it, I guess, php2shell must already be happening, the vulnerability is already there, but like... Shut up about it? Right? Let more people patch before you announce why the patch exists?
I'm new to this world so maybe this is normal?
They didn't move fast enough on it and others began circulating it. So they had to play catch up, hence the need to react before they had a patch.
https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-security-release-and-how-were-strengthening-php-security/
Wow, this article really reads as LLM-generated to me. The quoted section with the "We won't pretend otherwise:", the second paragraph in:
Could they not be bothered to write a write-up about such a critical severity?
Plex is a closed source software, so it's easier to just push an update and tell about this later. PHP is open source, so if they release a patch for it, you can immediately look up in the source code and find out what has been fixed and kind of reverse engineer what the problem could be.
As this is a very high-class vulnerability, I assume that it's very easy to get into this so if you see the patch, it's probably trivial to just find out what the issue is and immediately start attacking everyone. With this, at least most admins are ready and can plan in that on this time they should check into the issue and patch asap.
Ah that makes more sense, that's the key I was missing, thank you
Using a tool like Shodan, I can quickly get a list of addresses that have a specific version of PHP behind it.
It sounds like this is a cvss 9.0 or higher for PHP which is bonkers because PHP is such a huge amount of the internet.
My guess is releasing these CVEs the normal way could have catastrophic consequences. They're giving stsadmins a heads up so there is less of a scramble when sysadmins read "hey fix your shit it's totally vulnerable" before they have their coffee.
Like as a sysadmin, this is a great way for them to do this.
I will in 10 mins alert my team that the whole site has to come offline for a period today. I don't need to take it offline in an emergency and tell my boss to send out a memo.
I wonder how many docker containers keep their own version of PHP...
I can tell you that every docker container we had running was vulnerable, and none had new versions as of around noon today.
The manual fix is relatively easy, just change a few configs.
They originally tried to keep it secret but it got leaked. Initial reports were only that CVSS was 9.2 and it was a permissionless remote code execution exploit. After it got leaked what the exploit was, they gave up.
Services are only exposed on local WiFi and behind Tailscale, updated all as soon as possible: still quite safe right?
Yeah, as long as your firewall is properly hardened and up to date.
And not using php for a webui
I just happened to read this thread after deciding to open Jerboa after months and I stumbled into this, I have been updating my stuff for the past 30', thank you for making this post and making me aware of this issue! (Even though I'm 8 hours late)
The
beatingscyberattacks will continue untilmoralesecurity improvesThink of Louisiana before Katrina. Those systems of pumps and dykes are expensive and had been neglected... which was fine right up until they were severely tested by Katrina.
Our orange city counselman stopped funding repairs and inspections on the dykes and pumps many years ago (when he destroyed CISA). They've been deteriorating from neglect ever since.
A large hurricane is going to hit at 14:00 UTC
(In 10 minutes)
It'll almost certainly be handled quietly and nobody will know but system admins, but this could be a bigger thing than usual.
The vulnerabilities go back that far. You're not safe.
Hey, never said I was laughing out of happiness... 😭
Synology had a critical system and PHP package update yesterday, could it be related 🤔
No, there is no fix released for this PHP vulnerability
Wouldn't be surprised if the big guys got first dibs before everyone else
@Guiorgy @shadowtofu That's not how embargoes work. If "the big guys" release, everybody releases. There have clearly been leaks, but afaik no patches made public yet.
Dibs on the patches? They are not finite.
Commercial patching and the sla’s are huge business. You do know how rhel works right?
Yes. And again, patches aren't a finite commodity.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 19 acronyms.
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Patches are showing up in the repos now. Ondrej and ubuntu 24.04 have them live now.
so for the docker images of PHP there currently seems to be no patch? or do you think the RC version includes the fix? Because it was released at 07:00UTC i would think it dosnt yet include the fix. edit: nvm the patched versions without RC are now also in the docker hub repos.
dose anyone know how and where to check if the fix was applied? also do we know if docker hubs Vulnerabilities score already include php2shell CVEs?