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Tech leaders are warning of a coming “vulnerability tsunami” after researchers used AI to help find two critical flaws in PHP, the coding language behind millions of websites. Wiz researchers say the underlying flaws had been present for decades.
The scramble began with the October 21 disclosure. The NSA issued an urgent alert, and government and private websites in the US and UK temporarily went offline to apply fixes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said exploit attempts climbed from thousands in the 10 hours before the announcement to millions afterward, and CISA has since confirmed the flaws are being exploited.
“I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Anthropic deputy chief information security officer Jason Clinton warned there “won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure,” and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called it a “code red.” The next two years, Prince said, will be “incredibly fraught.”
Source: The Guardian
Tech leaders are warning of a coming “vulnerability tsunami” after researchers used AI to help find two critical flaws in PHP, the coding language behind millions of websites. Wiz researchers say the underlying flaws had been present for decades.
The scramble began with the October 21 disclosure. The NSA issued an urgent alert, and government and private websites in the US and UK temporarily went offline to apply fixes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said exploit attempts climbed from thousands in the 10 hours before the announcement to millions afterward, and CISA has since confirmed the flaws are being exploited.
“I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Anthropic deputy chief information security officer Jason Clinton warned there “won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure,” and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called it a “code red.” The next two years, Prince said, will be “incredibly fraught.”
Source: The Guardian
Denver Health Medical Plan (DHMP) is notifying 238 083 current and former members that their personal and health data may have been exposed after an access key belonging to its analytics vendor, SquareML, was accidentally leaked on a public website.
The key went online on June 27, 2025, and stayed live until it was revoked on August 18, 2026 — a 14-month exposure window. SquareML told DHMP about the leak on August 14.
The key gave read-only access to a SquareML database holding names, birth dates, ZIP codes, plan eligibility, hospital admission and discharge data, and health metrics such as BMI, HbA1c, and eGFR values. It couldn’t be used to download, export, or change records, and no Social Security numbers or financial data were stored there.
DHMP says it has no evidence the information was viewed or misused, only that it may have been, and has reset passwords on all accounts with database access.
Source: SecurityWeek
Denver Health Medical Plan (DHMP) is notifying 238 083 current and former members that their personal and health data may have been exposed after an access key belonging to its analytics vendor, SquareML, was accidentally leaked on a public website.
The key went online on June 27, 2025, and stayed live until it was revoked on August 18, 2026 — a 14-month exposure window. SquareML told DHMP about the leak on August 14.
The key gave read-only access to a SquareML database holding names, birth dates, ZIP codes, plan eligibility, hospital admission and discharge data, and health metrics such as BMI, HbA1c, and eGFR values. It couldn’t be used to download, export, or change records, and no Social Security numbers or financial data were stored there.
DHMP says it has no evidence the information was viewed or misused, only that it may have been, and has reset passwords on all accounts with database access.
Source: SecurityWeek
CISA has added two critical PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, collectively called PHP2Shell, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, confirming active exploitation in the wild. Both flaws score 9.2 on CVSS v4.0 and can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. The listing followed successful code execution against honeypots on October 24, reported by Perplexity detection and response lead Adel Karimi.
Karimi noted the chain ran on a deliberately favorable single-worker Apache mod_php setup, so it doesn’t show how reliably the exploit works elsewhere. Censys estimates more than 32.5 million PHP services still run an affected version.
Fixes landed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35 on October 21, and US federal agencies must apply them by October 29. PHP 8.1 and earlier no longer receive official fixes.
Source: The Hacker News
CISA has added two critical PHP vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, collectively called PHP2Shell, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, confirming active exploitation in the wild. Both flaws score 9.2 on CVSS v4.0 and can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. The listing followed successful code execution against honeypots on October 24, reported by Perplexity detection and response lead Adel Karimi.
Karimi noted the chain ran on a deliberately favorable single-worker Apache mod_php setup, so it doesn’t show how reliably the exploit works elsewhere. Censys estimates more than 32.5 million PHP services still run an affected version.
Fixes landed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35 on October 21, and US federal agencies must apply them by October 29. PHP 8.1 and earlier no longer receive official fixes.
Source: The Hacker News
Dutch police arrested two men on October 6 over a bank helpdesk fraud scheme that stole more than €380,000 (~$425,600) from 170 victims in about three weeks. Victims received calls with AI-generated audio impersonating their bank, then a fake bank employee told them to download an app and scan their debit card against their phone.
That app extracted the card’s NFC chip data and relayed it to an accomplice waiting at an ATM, who then withdrew cash in real time. A 23-year-old from Vaassen allegedly built the infrastructure and directed the attacks, while a 25-year-old from Ede coordinated operations. Both remain in custody, and authorities seized their servers, phones, and laptops.
Source: SecurityWeek
Dutch police arrested two men on October 6 over a bank helpdesk fraud scheme that stole more than €380,000 (~$425,600) from 170 victims in about three weeks. Victims received calls with AI-generated audio impersonating their bank, then a fake bank employee told them to download an app and scan their debit card against their phone.
That app extracted the card’s NFC chip data and relayed it to an accomplice waiting at an ATM, who then withdrew cash in real time. A 23-year-old from Vaassen allegedly built the infrastructure and directed the attacks, while a 25-year-old from Ede coordinated operations. Both remain in custody, and authorities seized their servers, phones, and laptops.
Source: SecurityWeek
A vulnerability originally flagged in Node.js turns out to be much broader. CVE-2026-111497 lives inside Google’s Brotli decoder, and JFrog researchers Aviv Engelberg, Eddy Tsalolikhin, and Ofri Ouzan have shown it can crash or corrupt .NET apps, FFmpeg, ClickHouse servers, and Apache Arrow workloads.
The flaw affects Brotli 1.0.3 through 1.2.0 and is fixed in 1.0.10, 1.1.1, and 1.2.1. An invalid block switch tricks the decoder into continuing with broken state, enabling out-of-bounds memory writes. ClickHouse crashed on a single crafted HTTP request. Apache Arrow entered an infinite CPU loop. FFmpeg corrupted memory via a malicious JPEG XL file, though the researchers stopped short of a full remote code execution exploit.
Node.js patches shipped October 21, and Microsoft began rolling out .NET updates on October 25. When the research was published, ClickHouse had merged a fix without shipping a release, and Arrow’s issue was still open. Teams should audit any code path that decompresses untrusted Brotli data — version numbers alone won’t tell the full story, because projects can patch Brotli without changing versions.
Source: Cybersecurity News
A vulnerability originally flagged in Node.js turns out to be much broader. CVE-2026-111497 lives inside Google’s Brotli decoder, and JFrog researchers Aviv Engelberg, Eddy Tsalolikhin, and Ofri Ouzan have shown it can crash or corrupt .NET apps, FFmpeg, ClickHouse servers, and Apache Arrow workloads.
The flaw affects Brotli 1.0.3 through 1.2.0 and is fixed in 1.0.10, 1.1.1, and 1.2.1. An invalid block switch tricks the decoder into continuing with broken state, enabling out-of-bounds memory writes. ClickHouse crashed on a single crafted HTTP request. Apache Arrow entered an infinite CPU loop. FFmpeg corrupted memory via a malicious JPEG XL file, though the researchers stopped short of a full remote code execution exploit.
Node.js patches shipped October 21, and Microsoft began rolling out .NET updates on October 25. When the research was published, ClickHouse had merged a fix without shipping a release, and Arrow’s issue was still open. Teams should audit any code path that decompresses untrusted Brotli data — version numbers alone won’t tell the full story, because projects can patch Brotli without changing versions.
Source: Cybersecurity News
Palo Alto Networks has confirmed that the two critical PHP2Shell flaws in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, affect every release of PAN-OS 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, and 12.2 on PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls, plus all Panorama systems. No special configuration is needed to be vulnerable. Two cloud services, Cortex XCORE and WildFire Cloud, were also affected but have since been fixed.
PHP scores both flaws 9.2 on CVSS v4.0, but Palo Alto rates the impact on its products at 8.7, High, and lists availability as the affected property rather than data theft or takeover. Exposure is limited to the management web interface and XML API, plus any dataplane interface with a management profile attached. GlobalProtect portals and gateways aren’t affected.
Palo Alto says it isn’t aware of malicious exploitation of its products, though Unit 42 has seen proof-of-concept exploits for PHP2Shell. The first PAN-OS hotfixes are estimated for October 26, with the rest due by October 30. Until then, admins should restrict management interface access to trusted internal IPs and avoid internet-facing exposure.
Source: Cybersecurity News
Palo Alto Networks has confirmed that the two critical PHP2Shell flaws in PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, affect every release of PAN-OS 10.2, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, and 12.2 on PA-Series and VM-Series firewalls, plus all Panorama systems. No special configuration is needed to be vulnerable. Two cloud services, Cortex XCORE and WildFire Cloud, were also affected but have since been fixed.
PHP scores both flaws 9.2 on CVSS v4.0, but Palo Alto rates the impact on its products at 8.7, High, and lists availability as the affected property rather than data theft or takeover. Exposure is limited to the management web interface and XML API, plus any dataplane interface with a management profile attached. GlobalProtect portals and gateways aren’t affected.
Palo Alto says it isn’t aware of malicious exploitation of its products, though Unit 42 has seen proof-of-concept exploits for PHP2Shell. The first PAN-OS hotfixes are estimated for October 26, with the rest due by October 30. Until then, admins should restrict management interface access to trusted internal IPs and avoid internet-facing exposure.
Source: Cybersecurity News
LiteLLM, a popular open source proxy for AI model routing, was compromised on October 21 when attackers hijacked its release pipeline and published a poisoned version 1.107.0. The packages were live for about three hours across PyPI and Docker Hub, long enough for an estimated 49 000 downloads. The GitHub source tag was clean — the artifacts came from a lookalike repository.
Attackers held GitHub CLI OAuth tokens for three developer accounts. LiteLLM says one set likely leaked through Claude Code, which in specific circumstances embeds tokens into a response body that may be logged — and the internal deployment holding those logs was exposed to the public internet. How the attackers reached that deployment, or moved laterally once inside, remains unclear. They used the tokens to disable branch protections, redirect the release pipeline, and publish signed packages.
The payload drops three files into the site-packages root and runs whenever a Python interpreter starts, with no import of litellm needed. It harvests browser credentials, AWS, GCP, and Azure secrets, SSH keys, and AI API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub Copilot, encrypting them to litellm[.]dev — a lookalike domain registered eight days earlier. A second component fetches fresh code hourly.
Wiz saw attackers querying Amazon Bedrock with stolen AWS credentials about 4.5 hours after exfiltration, which it reads as LLMjacking. Enterprise customers on LiteLLM’s private repository were unaffected. Anyone who installed 1.107.0, including through the Docker latest, main-latest, or main-stable tags, should remove it, rotate every credential on the machine, and scan for malware. The latest clean version is 1.106.2.
Source: SecurityWeek
LiteLLM, a popular open source proxy for AI model routing, was compromised on October 21 when attackers hijacked its release pipeline and published a poisoned version 1.107.0. The packages were live for about three hours across PyPI and Docker Hub, long enough for an estimated 49 000 downloads. The GitHub source tag was clean — the artifacts came from a lookalike repository.
Attackers held GitHub CLI OAuth tokens for three developer accounts. LiteLLM says one set likely leaked through Claude Code, which in specific circumstances embeds tokens into a response body that may be logged — and the internal deployment holding those logs was exposed to the public internet. How the attackers reached that deployment, or moved laterally once inside, remains unclear. They used the tokens to disable branch protections, redirect the release pipeline, and publish signed packages.
The payload drops three files into the site-packages root and runs whenever a Python interpreter starts, with no import of litellm needed. It harvests browser credentials, AWS, GCP, and Azure secrets, SSH keys, and AI API keys from Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub Copilot, encrypting them to litellm[.]dev — a lookalike domain registered eight days earlier. A second component fetches fresh code hourly.
Wiz saw attackers querying Amazon Bedrock with stolen AWS credentials about 4.5 hours after exfiltration, which it reads as LLMjacking. Enterprise customers on LiteLLM’s private repository were unaffected. Anyone who installed 1.107.0, including through the Docker latest, main-latest, or main-stable tags, should remove it, rotate every credential on the machine, and scan for malware. The latest clean version is 1.106.2.
Source: SecurityWeek
Oracle has pushed an emergency Java security update to fix CVE-2026-91403, a critical vulnerability scoring 9.1 on CVSS 3.1, published October 21. The flaw sits in JSSE, the Java SE component that handles HTTPS trust decisions, and also affects GraalVM. Oracle rates it easy to exploit, with no login or user interaction needed.
The root cause lies outside Java’s code: certificate authority eMudhra issued intermediate certificates with weak private keys, after a scripting error left them one byte long. An attacker in a man-in-the-middle position could use those keys to forge certificates for any hostname, making malicious sites appear legitimate to Java clients. Browsers already reject the eight revoked certificates; Oracle’s update makes Java distrust them too.
Affected supported releases are Java SE 8u511, 11.0.33, 17.0.21, 21.0.13, 25.0.5, and 27.0.1, plus GraalVM for JDK 17.0.21 and 21.0.13 and GraalVM Enterprise Edition 21.3.20. Older, unsupported versions weren’t tested and may also be vulnerable. No confirmed attacks have been reported.
Oracle recommends updating immediately. As a stopgap, admins can replace Java’s blocked.certs file with Oracle’s supplied version (blacklisted.certs on Java 8) or turn on TLS revocation checks.
Source: Cybersecurity News
Oracle has pushed an emergency Java security update to fix CVE-2026-91403, a critical vulnerability scoring 9.1 on CVSS 3.1, published October 21. The flaw sits in JSSE, the Java SE component that handles HTTPS trust decisions, and also affects GraalVM. Oracle rates it easy to exploit, with no login or user interaction needed.
The root cause lies outside Java’s code: certificate authority eMudhra issued intermediate certificates with weak private keys, after a scripting error left them one byte long. An attacker in a man-in-the-middle position could use those keys to forge certificates for any hostname, making malicious sites appear legitimate to Java clients. Browsers already reject the eight revoked certificates; Oracle’s update makes Java distrust them too.
Affected supported releases are Java SE 8u511, 11.0.33, 17.0.21, 21.0.13, 25.0.5, and 27.0.1, plus GraalVM for JDK 17.0.21 and 21.0.13 and GraalVM Enterprise Edition 21.3.20. Older, unsupported versions weren’t tested and may also be vulnerable. No confirmed attacks have been reported.
Oracle recommends updating immediately. As a stopgap, admins can replace Java’s blocked.certs file with Oracle’s supplied version (blacklisted.certs on Java 8) or turn on TLS revocation checks.
Source: Cybersecurity News
Microsoft has tied the attack on ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service to Storm-0940, a hacking group it describes as China-state aligned. According to Microsoft, the group used ARTEX, an open-source AI penetration-testing framework, and compromised application credentials tied to the service to try to break into more than 2 250 downstream Microsoft 365 tenants. Most attempts failed, but in multiple cases the attackers gained privileged cloud access in under three hours.
ARTEX generated up to 2 900 sign-in attempts per minute, leaving defenders little time to respond. Microsoft says the attack was part of a broader Storm-0940 campaign, active since at least September, that targeted hundreds of organizations in industries including defense, energy, aerospace, and financial services. How the attackers first obtained the credentials remains undisclosed.
ConnectWise has suspended Cloud Backup and taken its SaaS Security and Cloud Management services offline, though it says existing backup archives show no sign of compromise. The company urges customers to keep affected connections offline until further notice, and Microsoft advises reviewing every linked Microsoft 365 tenant and preserving logs before making changes.
Source: Dark Reading
Microsoft has tied the attack on ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service to Storm-0940, a hacking group it describes as China-state aligned. According to Microsoft, the group used ARTEX, an open-source AI penetration-testing framework, and compromised application credentials tied to the service to try to break into more than 2 250 downstream Microsoft 365 tenants. Most attempts failed, but in multiple cases the attackers gained privileged cloud access in under three hours.
ARTEX generated up to 2 900 sign-in attempts per minute, leaving defenders little time to respond. Microsoft says the attack was part of a broader Storm-0940 campaign, active since at least September, that targeted hundreds of organizations in industries including defense, energy, aerospace, and financial services. How the attackers first obtained the credentials remains undisclosed.
ConnectWise has suspended Cloud Backup and taken its SaaS Security and Cloud Management services offline, though it says existing backup archives show no sign of compromise. The company urges customers to keep affected connections offline until further notice, and Microsoft advises reviewing every linked Microsoft 365 tenant and preserving logs before making changes.
Source: Dark Reading
Attackers are trying to exploit the critical PHP flaws dubbed php2shell at scale, two days after the PHP project shipped fixes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says the company saw thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the flaws were announced, rising to millions since. Amazon also saw attempts, but its websites kept running normally. No successful breaches have been confirmed so far.
Under the right conditions, the flaws let an unauthenticated attacker run code on servers running PHP, which security firm Wiz says powers 70% of the world’s websites. In the UK, tech minister Baroness Lloyd told the House of Lords that 32 government services were unavailable and four partially so, largely as a precaution while updates were applied.
Orange also suspended some services globally while it deployed fixes. Researchers scanning for exposed servers say organizations are patching more slowly than hoped, and experts warn the full impact could take months to surface.
Source: BBC News
Attackers are trying to exploit the critical PHP flaws dubbed php2shell at scale, two days after the PHP project shipped fixes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says the company saw thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the flaws were announced, rising to millions since. Amazon also saw attempts, but its websites kept running normally. No successful breaches have been confirmed so far.
Under the right conditions, the flaws let an unauthenticated attacker run code on servers running PHP, which security firm Wiz says powers 70% of the world’s websites. In the UK, tech minister Baroness Lloyd told the House of Lords that 32 government services were unavailable and four partially so, largely as a precaution while updates were applied.
Orange also suspended some services globally while it deployed fixes. Researchers scanning for exposed servers say organizations are patching more slowly than hoped, and experts warn the full impact could take months to surface.
Source: BBC News
