Yet another Hacker News

Amazon identifies Oct 17 PHP2Shell exploitation prior to public disclosure

85 points cubefox 1 hour ago 18 comments

hyperpape 1 hour ago | parent

There's also a tweet by Matthew Prince that says Cloudflare saw thousands of attempts pre-announcement, https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051, then tens of thousands post announcement, and now millions.

Unfortunately, if you read the announcement as referring to 14:00 UTC, that's several hours after Chainguard published their images. I don't know if it's plausible that people saw the Chainguard builds, understood the issue from those and built exploits, but a precise timeline would help understand better.

00deadbeef 1 hour ago | parent

The Cloudflare one refers to the time period after the leak where people had already made PoCs. Amazon’s detection is days earlier which is quite concerning.

cubefox 1 hour ago | parent

So either there was another (but non-public) leak or someone else discovered the exploit almost at the same time as it was about to be published. I guess the latter is much less likely because it would be a major coincidence.

post-it 6 minutes ago | parent

The attacker may have known about the exploit for a long time and were saving it, but upon finding out that it was about to be disclosed, they decided it was now or never.

sullivanmatt 21 minutes ago | parent

https://x.com/dok2001/status/2112811965735202970 was posted at 7:43 AM UTC on October 21, 2026, and Chainguard (according to the PHP Foundation blog post) shipped at 7:41 UTC. One of the big reasons Chainguard broke the embargo was because Cloudflare had been seeing attacks, IIRC.

VladVladikoff 46 minutes ago | parent

I’ve seen probing for it in server logs but not actual exploiting of it. I think the botnets added it to their vulnerability scanners but I have yet to see any examples of an actual working exploit. There are hundreds of vibe coded attempts on github but none of them work to the best of my knowledge. Would love someone to prove me wrong here.

Also this post from Amazon is embarrassing. They knew about it from the 17th yet failed to meet the embargo timeline and patch Amazon Linux (their patch is due to be released today the 22nd of Oct).

onionisafruit 35 minutes ago | parent

I don’t know when various parts of Amazon learned about it, but I don’t think this post means they knew about it on Oct 17. I think they looked at past logs from their honeypots and found a probe for php2shell happened on Oct 17.

boplicity 28 minutes ago | parent

What makes you think they knew about it from the 17th? "...dating to Oct. 17, 2026" means that's when it happened. It doesn't mean they identified it on the 17th.

bcvvvy 44 minutes ago | parent

Why haven’t they fixed Amazon Linux then?

Same as none of their AMIs for bottlerocket have emSign revocations.

Absolutely shit company who puts their customers at risk.

asah 31 minutes ago | parent

-1: if the fix breaks customers in other ways, they're screwed as well. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

bcvvvy 22 minutes ago | parent

Nearly every other vendor has pushed fixes for it, including where they pull their upstream stuff from. There's no excuse.

Tomdarkness 6 minutes ago | parent

It's a upstream targeted fix that was made available significantly faster in packages/images maintained by volunteers, it's not some untested downstream patch. Customers at this point would have likely taken their applications offline over this issue so it would have been difficult to make the situation any worse.

menomatter 43 minutes ago | parent

Do they differentiate between attempts and successful infiltration? I’m trying to understand whether this exploit is easy to use or not. There was an article here from yesterday that argued the exploit was not easy to use and needed LFI

Tomdarkness 37 minutes ago | parent

So Amazon knew about this exploit and that it was actively being used several days before the release of any patches. Despite this they still took 18 hours AFTER the release of the patches to provide updated version of their Amazon Linux packages?

https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023/issues/1148

I don't think this blog post is sending the message AWS intended...

boplicity 27 minutes ago | parent

What makes you think they knew about it on the 17th? Scanning old logs is not the same as understanding them as they're generated.

Tomdarkness 14 minutes ago | parent

If this is only a retrospective find then they should make it more clear, from the blog it reads to me as promoting their MadPot tool for detection pre CVE disclosure:

"Subsequently, from 2026-10-21 0200 UTC to 2026-10-21 0800 UTC, Amazon Threat Intelligence identified additional exploitation attempts of PHP2Shell targeting MadPot from additional anonymized infrastructure." (i.e almost 12 hours before the release of the patch)

"Invest in detections that don’t rely on a signature for a specific CVE. The first exploitation will often come before those signatures exist."

"We analyze over 200 billion events per minute and integrate threat intelligence from our MadPot honeypot network to identify and block known exploitation attempts in real time. Our honeypot system provides us with early detection of exploitation attempts, enabling rapid response and threat analysis."

ActionHank 34 minutes ago | parent

All these tech companies are school children comparing how much better their bike is than the others, but they've all got the exact same bike, and that bike is a massive vulnerability that they did nothing to fix, but they're all bragging about how they saw it first or identified it first.

To the person at amazon that thought this was a good press release to put out, I know this is what you were hoping for, so here it is, "wow, so cool". Not sure why, but AI really has everyone running around with desperate loser aura.

Maybe next time, do better, actually patch some things so your customers are covered?