PHP2Shell — 9.8,
RCE, patched 21 Oct
@Afro_Guru — both CVEs are real, and the chain is short enough to see in one picture.
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rankdir=TB; bgcolor="transparent"; nodesep=0.35; ranksep=0.45;
node [shape=box style="rounded,filled" fontname="Helvetica" fontsize=12 color="#8C3B3B" fillcolor="#FBEDED" penwidth=1.4];
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A [label="🐘 PHP core\n109618 · 9.8\n109619 · 8.1" fillcolor="#F6DADA"];
B [label="🌍 every site\nrunning PHP"];
C [label="⚡ one request\nno login"];
D [label="💥 code runs\nor memory leaks"];
E [label="✅ patched\n8.2.35 to 8.5.12" color="#2F6B4A" fillcolor="#EAF3EC"];
A -> B;
B -> C;
C -> D;
D -> E [style=dashed label="fix" fontsize=10];
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- CVE-2026-109618 — 9.8 CRITICAL, RCE, no login needed
- CVE-2026-109619 — 8.1 HIGH, memory disclosure, Heartbleed-shaped
- affected — PHP 5.4 → 8.5, a decade of releases
- fixed — 8.2.35 · 8.3.36 · 8.4.27 · 8.5.12, on 21 Oct 2026
70% of the web runs PHP. WordPress, Wikipedia, Joomla, Drupal, every cPanel host. The flaw is in PHP itself, so the fix is the engine underneath everything, not a plugin update. Two days after disclosure, most of the internet has not done it.
The memory bug leaks other requests’ passwords, session cookies, API keys and TLS private keys — silently, nothing in the logs. It sat in the codebase for a decade; humans could not chain it. Frontier AI models did — Wiz Research found it.
Check your own site in 30 seconds
node phpcheck.js "https://your-site.com"
openai/php2shell-checker ★816 · Apache-2.0 — reads the PHP your site advertises and tells you if it is inside the vulnerable range. OpenAI shipped it the day after its models helped find the bug.
On the server itself:
Patch the engine
| Branch |
Fixed release |
End of life |
| 8.5 |
8.5.12 |
2029 |
| 8.4 |
8.4.27 |
2028 |
| 8.3 |
8.3.36 |
2027 |
| 8.2 |
8.2.35 |
Dec 2026 |
| ≤ 8.1 |
upgrade to 8.3+ |
past |
# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install --only-upgrade php8.4-fpm php8.4-cli
# RHEL family
dnf upgrade php-fpm php-cli
# containers
docker pull php:8.4.27-fpm-alpine
# always, afterwards
systemctl restart php8.4-fpm
The restart is the fix. An old FPM master keeps serving the vulnerable binary until it is replaced. 
endoflife.date/php tracks the current release per branch, so the next one never surprises you.
Tools that appeared within 48 hours
- ikow/php2shell-poc ★1,521 · MIT — five pre-auth RCE chains on the heap use-after-free, plus Suricata, Sigma and ModSecurity rules in the same repo. Attack and defence, one download
- 9bie/php2shell-bypass-aslr-exp ★956 — bypasses ASLR without touching the patched binary. This is the repo that answers “how bad is it really”
- NCSC-NL/php2shell ★226 · EUPL — the Dutch government’s operational note, updated today
- CISA KEV catalog — 1,754 KEV entries in machine-readable JSON, refreshed daily. The list to watch this week
The mechanics, the lab, and what to do if you cannot patch today
109618 — the out-of-memory path. PHP aborts an OOM request with longjmp, and some contexts skip the cleanup. The next request finds memory uninitialised, and cleanup reads and branches on it. Chain it reliably and you steer execution → RCE. CWE-416, CWE-824, CWE-755, CWE-1325.
109619 — stale global state. Some globals point into request memory. When they are not reset, or get repopulated afterwards, they still reference freed memory. The next request reads or branches on that stale pointer: same family, different key.
Lab, your own box only:
services:
vuln:
image: php:8.4.26-fpm-alpine
ports: ["127.0.0.1:9000:9000"]
Drive the OOM paths from the advisories against 127.0.0.1:9000, watch the FPM logs, then pull php:8.4.27-fpm-alpine and repeat the same sequence. That difference is your proof the patch works.
No patch window in the next hour? Isolate tenants — one FPM pool per user, open_basedir set, no shared pools. Cross-request disclosure is the lever attackers pull first. Then rotate every secret that lived on the host during the exposure.
CVE-2026-109618 · CVE-2026-109619 · php-src advisories · openwall thread · PHP release archive
On a shared host, check today.
!