PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

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50 comments in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world view that post
[–] 65 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Wordpress sites suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

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  • [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 20 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (1 child)

    Should I take it down?

    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)?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 37 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

    Shouldn't especially vital services be taken down to secure them?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

    takes down 112 / 911 services

    Don't worry guys, we're safe now! ꒰ঌ(˶ˆᗜˆ˵)໒꒱

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)
  • [–] 31 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (2 children)

    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…

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    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.

    We won't pretend otherwise: the delay was a structural failure, caused by both the security team's decision process and its lack of resources. The security team has since started changing its processes, and that work continues, so that decisions can be made by majority and compromises are encouraged.

    https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-security-release-and-how-were-strengthening-php-security/

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago

    Wow, this article really reads as LLM-generated to me. The quoted section with the "We won't pretend otherwise:", the second paragraph in:

    This post isn't about how to update. It's about how these vulnerabilities were found and fixed, what has changed in how PHP security is handled over the past two years, and what we need from the organizations that depend on PHP to keep PHP's security work going.

    Could they not be bothered to write a write-up about such a critical severity?

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  • [–] 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Spare a moment's thought for the dev behind the ondrej PHP mirrors.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 weeks ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago*

    Nextcloud.

    Mailcow.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Services are only exposed on local WiFi and behind Tailscale, updated all as soon as possible: still quite safe right?

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago*

    Think 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.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    Synology had a critical system and PHP package update yesterday, could it be related 🤔

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  • [–] 23 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    No, there is no fix released for this PHP vulnerability

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  • [–] 7 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    Wouldn't be surprised if the big guys got first dibs before everyone else

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Dibs on the patches? They are not finite.

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  • [+] 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    laughs in keeping an old archive site still in PHP5

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago

    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)

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  • [–] [B] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    CA (SSL) Certificate Authority
    Plex Brand of media server package
    VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 19 acronyms.

    [Thread #142 for this comm, first seen 21st Oct 2026, 12:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    Patches are showing up in the repos now. Ondrej and ubuntu 24.04 have them live now.

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  • 20 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 21 points 2 weeks ago*

    Hmm, yes i would hope so... So far nothing seems to be affected tho.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago

    https://github.com/syhunt/php2shell-protection

    has some background and possible mitigations. But I shut down all my php sites...

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago
    [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    Nobody updates PHP lol

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  • [+] -9 points 2 weeks ago (15 children)

    It's wild to me that people are still using PHP in 2026. It was known to be a god awful trainwreck of a language all the way back in like 2005 and it certainly hasn't improved much since then. I guess that's what happens when a language peaks right at the height of the dotcom bubble.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago

    I used it quite a bit right at the beginning, when it was transitioning from being a "Pre-HTML Processor" templating utility to a proper language.

    The syntax was nice and easy to pick up. The rest was pretty bad, a lot of security was left to the developer following best practices.

    It improved with time, but it had already left a bad impression on me.

    I know it's still popular, as you can tell from the downvotes.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    You have no idea what you're talking about.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    I've been a professional programmer for over 30 years with some of the biggest companies in the world. I've worked with assembly, c, c++, c#, java, kotlin, perl, lua, haskell, rust, javascript, typescript, coffeescrpit, dart, php, python, and I'm sure 3 or 4 other languages I've just forgotten about at this point. Some of those languages are terrible and I hope never to touch again, others were great and I'd be happy to work with.

    PHP should have been retired as a language 20 yeara ago, but WordPress has kept it alive all this time. The rest of the industry has moved on and learned lessons from what came before, but the sheer momentum of hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs has somehow kept PHP alive. The language started as a hack, and it remains a hack. It's gotten faster over the years, but it's still just as badly designed today as it was when it was originally created.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 weeks ago

    As a security auditor, I would have specified that it's the OLD php plugins/scripts extensibility that was the mess. And similar to CGI, PHP used to be a problem for infosec audits because it was usually so full of configuration holes that the mantra just became "Don't use PHP". AJAX implementations are also rife with security issues because of configuration errors. So is a default implementation of nginx.

    But PHP gets the bad rep because it was hands down the most popular way to add custom functionality to a webapp during the time when infosec became a more widespread profession, a victim of its own success.

    As an aside, a default install of PHP on reasonably modern Linux today is a hell of a lot more secure than it was in 2009. I know this because I did the comparison for a presentation to my peers in 2023.

    This is the problem with extensible platforms that allow you the freedom to build what you want: their success is built on being malleable, which brings with it a lot of problems people with experience know to patch up, but less experienced people don't.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 weeks ago

    When you have no idea what you are talking about, you post something like this

    Its not 2005 anymore, not that PHP ever was a train wreck, but its not 2005 anymore. PHP has had a huge amount of improvements over the past two decades and I'll use it over anything else

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  • [–] 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    “It’s wild to me people are still using PHP”

    You must be isolated from development if you think PHP is not still everywhere.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    it certainly hasn’t improved much since then.

    I've heard the opposite talked about quite a bit.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5nGmE92zNA

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  • [–] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Of course it's Primeagen. I haven't watched this particular video, but I've seen enough of his videos to know he's an idiot. I wouldn't trust anything he says about programming, at least half of everything he says is wrong.

    Most of the things wrong with PHP can't be fixed, at least not without completely breaking all the existing PHP apps in such a fundamental way it would be tough to argue it's still the same language.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 weeks ago

    Lol, they did break a lot of backwards compatibility going from 5.6 to 7. That's why years later you still had people holding out on the migration because it was such a huge change.

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