Yet another Hacker News

PHP2Shell: Exploitation Attempts and Remediation Trends

92 points acossta 1 hour ago 34 comments

xx_ns 1 hour ago | parent

"No successful PHP2Shell exploits seen so far"... in the wild, specifically in Wiz's honeypot. The vulnerability itself has been successfully exploited, most notably for the "Steal my Bitcoin" challenge [1] as one example.

Dan Guido, of Trail of Bits, claims they have an "universal" exploit [2]. Knowing their track record, I don't currently have a reason to doubt this claim.

[1]: https://stealmybitcoin.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50226010

EDIT: The HN title has been changed since posting this comment.

paxy 1 hour ago | parent

It's funny that when stealmybitcoin.com was posted on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916) there were hundreds of top voted comments saying "see no one has been able to steal it, the reported vulnerability was fake, it's all AI marketing" etc.

Since it was successfully exploited there has been zero further discussion, and I bet most people who participated in the original thread aren't even aware.

ForHackernews 1 hour ago | parent

Two things can be true:

1) A motivated human eager for $500 and internet cred can exploit a vuln (perhaps using AI tooling to help)

2) The vuln is not easily exploitable at scale by driveby bots.

NitpickLawyer 1 hour ago | parent

IIUC, the first setup couldn't be exploited because the site didn't run any php. You kinda need the server to run some php if you're gonna use a php vuln. It got solved ~2h after they added a php-version.php ...

syshyk 52 minutes ago | parent

The main kickback was against the hype and it was "so easy for AI" and would take "15 minutes to compromise everything".

Either way, this was not true.

Tadpole9181 34 minutes ago | parent

The author didn't even have an accessible PHP server at first. When they actually added one, it got cracked in 2 hours.

milkshakes 30 minutes ago | parent

also it was under hn load which makes this much harder

howunfortunate 34 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, he hasn't had time to do the write up yet. When he does I fully expect it to hit the front page.

Topfi 31 minutes ago | parent

The person that succeeded already published [0]. Thread is barely active compared with the amount of engagement the challenges announcement received.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50237379

fwlr 13 minutes ago | parent

As one of those comments I dispute your characterization of it as the reported vulnerability being fake, very few people were saying that. The main thing being called fake was the narrative that with AI it was trivial to exploit the vulnerability.

It has not escaped me that the successful exploit did in fact just say “codex, exploit this” and got it.

I had assumed the rash of commenters saying “lol I am not revealing my AI’s exploit for a measly 500 bucks” were saying that because their AI attempt failed. Now I know they didn’t even try!

nubinetwork 1 hour ago | parent

Just last week companies were saying php2shell has been rampant for months, but if that were the case, wouldn't we all have strange errors in our logs? Something seems fishy to me.

jagged-chisel 1 hour ago | parent

Should we expect logs from a compromised system to be truthful?

minitech 56 minutes ago | parent

Which companies? The earliest claim of an exploit attempt in the wild I had heard was October 17th, and that was “extant”, not “rampant”.

I don’t suppose you’re thinking of when the issue was discovered? That was August 1st, according to https://calif.io/php2shell/#the-discovery.

nubinetwork 50 minutes ago | parent

Amazon said 4 days prior to patch, but I'm pretty sure the other one was cloudflare, I can't find the link in my browser history.

minitech 47 minutes ago | parent

So was “months” a typo for “4 days” or what?

cimi_ 14 minutes ago | parent

More details about stealmybitcoin in LiveOverflow's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhNiMWtOutw

This is the winner: https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC

The challenge website was not exploitable at launch because it wasn't actually running PHP; it got cracked in two hours aftewards

In the video, LiveOverflow shows his exploit that reliably gets RCE from two requests.

NorwegianDude 7 minutes ago | parent

The steal my Bitcoin challenge was nothing like a realistic common PHP setup. It was a extremely unrealistic and stupid setup, using the built in php dev server. It's even explicitly stated that it should never be exposed to the internet.

If it needs to hit the same worker to get it to work, that is a whole other problem, and that was not a part of the steal my bitcoin challenge. And what if pm.max_requests is set to 1? Is it then 100 % safe, as it respawns for each requests, making any statement for an universal exploit completely BS, or is a single requests exploit possible?

6_7 1 hour ago | parent

I'm so sorry, exposure is down how many percent?

rprouse 1 hour ago | parent

And at the same time Bleeping Computer is saying it has been successfully exploited, https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/php2shell-sec...

larahawkinsauth 57 minutes ago | parent

Great Breakdown

EGreg 37 minutes ago | parent

A lot of PHP environments were set up years ago, and run versions below PHP 8.1. If they don’t do something, eventually, they might be exploited, and turned into botnets or worse. A lot of the old PHP forums and other websites might get back door doors and impersonate people, etc.

I developed a proxy that sanitizes input before it reaches PHP. I had to put it together quickly, but since then, I’ve made it a lot more user-friendly, including PHP installation scripts that automatically scan your Web server configuration, and suggest exactly how to install the proxy. The proxy itself is written in C, and I recommend running it under a Linux user that has absolutely no file permissions. All it’s supposed to do is transform input into safe output. I would argue that this proxy might even be safer than the patch, because it might prevent other vulnerabilities that researchers haven’t found yet.

It’s just a generally good idea to sanitize input before it reaches your app servers anyway. But if you are running and older PHP environment, I don’t think there are any other good options than this…

https://github.com/Qbix/proxy

doctoboggan 28 minutes ago | parent

Maybe a grey hat should scan for all the vulnerable servers they can find, exploit them, and then patch them.

ghostbrainalpha 13 minutes ago | parent

That's the definition of a White Hat to me.

makmanalp 37 minutes ago | parent

This has been my hyperfixation for the last few days, and I've been trying to keep together a detailed and timestamped timeline of the evolving situation:

https://claude.ai/artifact/5cZex56WutyVnpMBrWXxzV

TLDR is multiple entries that show successful exploitation against particular setups (quite often honeypots that were kinda set up to be exploitable e.g. single worker mod_php or lab setups that are unclear on how well they match real deployments), one claim from dan guido / trail of bits about a broad exploit (but few details), millions of attempts in the wild but very little evidence of actual compromise (unit 42 withdrew theirs).

phplovesong 15 minutes ago | parent

PHP just sucks so bad.

denysvitali 7 minutes ago | parent

> but these scanners did successfully exploit Adel Karimi's honeypot, which was a likely contributing factor to CISA’s decision to include PHP2Shell in their KEV list.

Adel is doing an amazing job. Both in open source (https://github.com/perplexityai/bumblebee, https://github.com/perplexityai/numbat, https://github.com/0x4D31/galah) and with his reports.

So proud of him!