I'm actually somewhat surprised at the clumsiness here.
I'm a complete amateur that had DeepSeek build a PHP2Shell exploit, and once the stealmybitcoin site went up and set an upload limit, i had DeepSeek try to shrink/amplify it.
DeepSeek couldn't find anything but a 2x reduction, but reading the report of how it was done - https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC - I was somewhat surprised it didn't find it, and equally horrified at PHP allowing such a memory bomb of creating nested objects by parsing `f[0][x][x]...` from random requests.
Point being; these aren't amateurs but i kind of expect most well funded pros to have found this method to avoid sending massive filenames and session progress data.
For our US friends, as context, this is akin to Rudy Giuliani being a cybersecurity expert. Partly, because it simply never was Sebastian Kurzs area of expertise, mainly because the referenced corruption scandal centered around the use of Whatsapp to facilitate said corruption, so, you know...
He has already IT experience then. Surely he learned something out of it. Securely using apps. Discretely handling deals, etc.
Anyway from their webpage:
> We work directly with heads of state, ministries, national cyber authorities, and the senior officials responsible for executing national strategy.
So I presume he has and provides contacts. Just the usual one hand washes the other. Nothing nefarious I'm sure.
Reading this I'm almost certain the firewall vendor is Palo Alto Networks. They included a PAN-OS setting verbatim and the SELinux config matches my experience.
Extremely wrong. I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone. Exploiting the PHP request parser bypasses basically all security checks and it doesn't matter how secure your code is because the exploitable component runs before your code and can't be disabled.
I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day.
"There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day."
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
Shutting down half the internet was the right move. If it took someone 19 hours to exploit a site, you'd better have shut it down before 19 hours and not after.
I don't see what was confusing about the initial 24 hours. GP was correct, the description of the bug made it clear it was a very high risk.
Also, unless I am reading this wrong, it does not seem like what actually got the bitcoin was a 2shell-like exploit? Seems like memory corruption leading to printing out the flag through just http requests? How would you use this outside of a CTF context?
2shell is catchy shorthand for "do anything". log4shell (originator of the name?) didn't directly give you a shell either, it ran some Java code. You could have a shell if you wanted to.
> I'm not sure how "RCE on every PHP server, from anywhere on the internet, no other requirements" could possibly be underblown by anyone
It could be overblown if it's not true. The amount of time it took for anyone to claim the Bitcoin from the supposedly-vulnerable PHP site convinced a lot of people that the vulnerability was not as bad as claimed.
wasn't it setup in an unexploitable configuration (not actually serving a php page IIRC?) for most of the time, and then got popped within like 2 hours once fixed?
> I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
Not having made the claim (took down my website too), but because PHP is not connected directly to the network. While you cannot prevent PHP from being overtaken from inside the PHP program, you can prevent PHP being executed on malicious data by configuring the webserver. It's overblown in the sense that it would be even more serious if the same happened in the webserver itself.
I think it goes back to the huge amount of anti-AI sentiment that's out there today. Any AI accomplishment gets undersold by haters, i.e. people maintaining that the Navier-Stokes solution was stolen, people saying that Lean proofs can't be relied on, exploits like PHP2Shell are esoteric and not usable in the real-world, etc. Those are just comments I recall reading off the top of my head but I could find sources if anyone wants. I think it's just a way for people to cope and fool themselves into thinking that this whole AI thing isn't a big deal and will just blow over.
Its overblown in the sense that 70% of the internet was not in fact vulnerable, as widely reported. And not everyone is a hackor because they have access to llms. Go look at normie coverage from people like Linus tech tips and you'll see them saying how millions of servers were under attack by script kiddies with llms, amd how llms are so dangerous.
The whole thing was basically a psyop, whether intential or not idk but Califs research was funded in part by OpenAI so there's that.
I agree. There's nuance to it. I believe the CVE was overblown, and I also believe that it is a severe vulnerability that should be addressed ASAP. 2 things can be true at once.
It was OpenAI's marketing that hyped up the vulnerability to the point that guys on my hockey team saw it in the news and were asking about it. There doesn't need to be mainstream articles about it, these kinds of vulnerabilities happen every year. Just patch and move on.
Respect, hats off to reevaluate when presented with the info. Will fully admit, I myself lacked the ability to assess the true severity, mainly cause I try to stay away from PHP since my first encounter in sixth grade, so was going a bit back-and-forth due to what I was reading.
Mainly saw the severity in the economic impact of having to quickly patch so much, but taking offline being the right choice given the risk, along with of course all the decades old, never patches, blogs being botnet targets someday in the future, akin to Wordpress being commonly used for Ransomware hosting for similar reasons. And of course hopefully learning something from the timeline and leak for future disclosures. Feel things need to generally change from the status quo, barely has changed since the 2015 Google/MSFT squabble...
Yes, you were. These exploits are happening in processes like php-fpm before it actually executes any code for the web application, so its not like you need to find endpoint where a specific class is being invoked or anything like that.
Nah, I guess it is Palo Alto. PHP and Appweb is their stack AFAIK. Forti does not use PHP, Juniper uses Appweb with PHP but on FreeBSD - but the article mentions SELinux.
it probably starts with a correct and safe authorization check, but this vulnerability happens before any user code runs, so every PHP page is vulnerable.
True-ish? If your firewall's admin page is internet-accessible, you have no excuse for not doing "bolted to bedrock" lockdowns of your web server config and your PHP config. Either of which could have blocked exploitation of the PHP vuln.
I'm actually somewhat surprised at the clumsiness here.
I'm a complete amateur that had DeepSeek build a PHP2Shell exploit, and once the stealmybitcoin site went up and set an upload limit, i had DeepSeek try to shrink/amplify it.
DeepSeek couldn't find anything but a 2x reduction, but reading the report of how it was done - https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC - I was somewhat surprised it didn't find it, and equally horrified at PHP allowing such a memory bomb of creating nested objects by parsing `f[0][x][x]...` from random requests.
Point being; these aren't amateurs but i kind of expect most well funded pros to have found this method to avoid sending massive filenames and session progress data.
Anyway from their webpage: > We work directly with heads of state, ministries, national cyber authorities, and the senior officials responsible for executing national strategy.
So I presume he has and provides contacts. Just the usual one hand washes the other. Nothing nefarious I'm sure.
Just for context, that is the type of evil we're talking about here.
A German comedian made an episode about it [1]
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=_PF23EdGNcE
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50272530
I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day.
19 hours: https://stealmybitcoin.com/
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
I don't see what was confusing about the initial 24 hours. GP was correct, the description of the bug made it clear it was a very high risk.
https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC
It could be overblown if it's not true. The amount of time it took for anyone to claim the Bitcoin from the supposedly-vulnerable PHP site convinced a lot of people that the vulnerability was not as bad as claimed.
This was not a scary vuln at all.
And would you stake your bitcoin on it?
Not having made the claim (took down my website too), but because PHP is not connected directly to the network. While you cannot prevent PHP from being overtaken from inside the PHP program, you can prevent PHP being executed on malicious data by configuring the webserver. It's overblown in the sense that it would be even more serious if the same happened in the webserver itself.
The whole thing was basically a psyop, whether intential or not idk but Califs research was funded in part by OpenAI so there's that.
It was OpenAI's marketing that hyped up the vulnerability to the point that guys on my hockey team saw it in the news and were asking about it. There doesn't need to be mainstream articles about it, these kinds of vulnerabilities happen every year. Just patch and move on.
Mainly saw the severity in the economic impact of having to quickly patch so much, but taking offline being the right choice given the risk, along with of course all the decades old, never patches, blogs being botnet targets someday in the future, akin to Wordpress being commonly used for Ransomware hosting for similar reasons. And of course hopefully learning something from the timeline and leak for future disclosures. Feel things need to generally change from the status quo, barely has changed since the 2015 Google/MSFT squabble...
We need more of this.
And the vendor's firewall software runs an unpatched version.
Believe it or not in cybersecurity there are many considerations in how “bad” a vulnerability is.