Threat Pulse 62High
Mirai operators join PHP2Shell attacks; ASLR bypass exploit, no confirmed compromise
Severity 7ActiveconfirmedWeb servers and gateways

Sophos, Hunt.io and Arctic Wolf saw a Mirai-style botnet trying to drop the Potassium malware through PHP2Shell, and VulnCheck built an exploit that defeats ASLR on hardened x86-64 production configs. Yet Sophos retracted a reported success and SOCRadar, Wordfence and Sansec report no confirmed shell access; public exploits fail against default settings. Qualys saw 199,000 instances patched in 12 hours but 71 percent of PHP installs are end-of-life.

What to do: Attacks continue; roughly 110 million PHP instances on EOL versions per Qualys. Oct 24: first documented, validated PHP2Shell RCE in the wild, on honeypots. Adel Ka's honeypots (PHP 8.4.26, Apache mod_php) logged 35 shells from two hosting-network sources between 15:35 and 18:57 UTC, each proven by a shell process spawned by the Apache worker; the attacks beat ASLR with a memory leak. Marcus Hutc…

· 13 days ago · millions of exploitation attempts; 123 servers in one operator's rounds · github.com
Sourcesgithub.comThe Hacker NewsSecurityWeek
On X
@0x4D31verifiedOct 24, 21:01 UTC

ok, this might be the first publicly documented, validated PHP2Shell RCE in the wild.

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@DefusedCyberverifiedOct 25, 06:24 UTC

php2shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619): we're seeing P2SB multipart probes hitting our Palo Alto GlobalProtect honeypots.

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@MalwareTechBlogverifiedOct 24, 20:41 UTC

This is by far the highest quality confirmation of in-the-wild php2shell exploitation I've seen so far.

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@UK_Daniel_CardverifiedOct 25, 06:38 UTC

I've not seen any proof of an in the wild victim exists for #PHP2SHELL. I've seen claims but zero proof.

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Why this score

Internet-wide target (impact 4), mass attempts but no confirmed compromise (exploitability 3), general (criticality 0).

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Updated Nov 5, 01:45 UTC. Refreshes on its own.

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