PHP2Shell vulnerability exploitable but impractical for unskilled attackers
Original title: Observations from Running stealmybitcoin.com
Experiment on stealmybitcoin.com showed PHP2Shell drains Bitcoin wallets but required specific setup and only one of tens of thousands succeeded.
A blog post tests the practicality of the PHP2Shell vulnerability by running a Bitcoin-draining challenge site. The author found the vulnerability was exploitable over an open internet connection but unskilled attackers struggled to succeed even with AI assistance. Only the challenge winner extracted useful data from the flag binary.
- Challenge winner exploited PHP2Shell directly over open internet
- Tens of thousands attempted exploit but only one succeeded
- VPS faced high load, DDoS suspicion, and worker resets
- Logs captured continuous PHP worker takedowns
Impact: draining Bitcoin wallet via PHP2Shell exploit
| Product | Affected |
|---|---|
| PHP | — |
From the original article
12 min read at pavursec.comLast week, I saw an article on the front page of the New York Times website reporting that a critical vulnerability in PHP had been found. The article, and others like it , claimed any attacker could achieve arbitrary remote code execution on any of the millions of running PHP services worldwide simply by sending a few unauthenticated web requests that exploited the PHP2Shell vulnerability.
By pavursec.com via wezm · pavursec.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.