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Hackers Exploited the PHP Vulnerabilities Days Before They Were Patched

Publisher description: Amazon Web Services logged attempts to leverage the internet-melting PHP2Shell bugs four days ago. They're now being “broadly exploited” across the internet.

Wired | Oct 22, 2026 | Lily Hay Newman

Automated excerpt

The internet’s mad scramble on Wednesday to patch a pair of critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a widely used web scripting language, was already too late to stop every attack, newly released details reveal. Wednesday’s release of fixes for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP caused administrators and security staff to race to identify and patch vulnerable websites and apps, while attackers inevitably reverse engineered the fixes to learn how to exploit the flaws. Some governments and other groups even proactively took key websites down in anticipation of the release, so they wouldn't be targeted before they could apply the patches.

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