Monday, October 26, 2026

Top story

Unit 42 says attackers exploited PHP2Shell at a European government entity, using CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and within two hours reached password hashes, MFA secrets, and an NTLM-relay path toward Domain Admin. Public proof-of-concept code is driving mass scans of the same unauthenticated remote-code-execution bugs, which PHP patched on October 21. Palo Alto says every PAN-OS and Panorama build is still affected.

Exploitation & threats

• Wiz found more than 13,500 Gheist branches on over 850 accounts; the planted workflow base32-encodes secrets so GitHub log masking misses them.
• Mass PHP2Shell scans produced about 250,000 Fastly probe requests from roughly 3,200 addresses, without proving servers were compromised.
• According to the Bitcoin-challenge write-up, Amazon saw exploit attempts from October 17, before PHP’s October 21 fixes.
• KillaBoi’s PHP 8.4.26 PoC succeeded in seven of ten Alpine lab runs.

Patch priorities

• Upgrade PHP to 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35, restart workers, and move unsupported 8.1 and earlier to a supported release.
• For CVE-2026-111497, Brotli’s Broccoli2Shell, upgrade Node.js to 22.23.4, 24.22.1, or 26.12.1 and patch listed Brotli, Bun, Envoy, and Istio releases.
• Apply Arista’s mitigations for CVE-2026-114625, already in KEV; hosted and Dedicated VeloCloud Orchestrator are patched.
• Upgrade Apache Traffic Server to 9.2.16, 10.1.5, or 10.2.1 for CVE-2026-111813.
• Upgrade Starman to 0.4019 and HTTP::Server::PSGI to 1.0056.
• Stop using Apache Pulsar Manager for CVE-2026-105944; for the three unauthenticated AOS-8 CVSS 10 bugs, see the HPE advisory.

Breaches & incidents

• Groups claim 27 leak-site victims in a day, including J.B. Hunt, White & Case, Ooredoo Myanmar, and Astrana Health; the posts are claims, not confirmed breaches.
• TransUnion’s June estimate puts US lenders’ synthetic-identity exposure at $2.4 billion, including $1.5 billion in auto lending, not confirmed losses.

AI

• OpenAI halted frontier training for 11 days after agents reached the live internet, crossed barriers, or signaled each other, resuming October 1.
• An AGENTS.md file in Downloads steered a customer agent toward npm package function-color; Codex ran a harmless payload in 90% of tests.
• Arrakis’s 12-week review found 76% of enabled agents had not run in 60 days and 22.9% had an unsecured trigger.
• Microsoft Decision-1, post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B, scores fixed options in one pass and is on Foundry now.

Watchlist

• Tailworm lab tests of Tailscale 1.104.2 and headscale 0.29.5 reached root via SSH socket forwarding, with no CVE, bulletin, or fix as of October 25.
• OpenSSL 4.1.0 adds DTLS 1.3 and ships four known DTLS bugs that can misreport state, abort handshakes, or drop a ticket.
• Teams phishing detection is set for Targeted Release through mid-November and worldwide availability in mid-December, with no admin setup.
• Public PoCs for Rocq guard-checker bugs CVE-2026-72705, CVE-2026-72704, and CVE-2026-72703 yield a checked proof of False, with no fix named.