PHP2Shell, the pair of critical PHP flaws, is now being exploited at scale, and Amazon says probing began four days before the patches; government sites in Australia, the UK and Europe went offline as a precaution. GitLab fixed a maximum-severity flaw reaching back to 2014, and Microsoft tied the ConnectWise cloud compromise to China-aligned Storm-0940 using ARTEX AI agents. LiteLLM traced its poisoned release to GitHub tokens captured in its own AI gateway logs.
Reporting window: 24 hours to 7:00 am AEDT, Friday 23 October 2026. Open sources only.
Australian focus
- Australian government sites taken offline for PHP patching: cyber.gov.au, abs.gov.au and some NSW sites pulled as a precaution on 21 October; ASD says no indication they were affected and it is not aware of successful exploitation in Australia; minister says no breach. ASD's critical alert updated: patches released. ASD's ACSC, ABC News, Government News, Canberra Times
- Earliest PHP2Shell probe came from an Australian-geolocated address: an anonymisation network IP on 17 October, per Amazon; not attributable (low confidence as a lead). The Hacker News
- Fisher & Paykel Healthcare email compromise: two employee mailboxes and some files accessed; some personal information; no ransomware, operations and patient data systems unaffected. F&P Healthcare
Global threat activity
- PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619) exploited at scale: Cloudflare reports millions of attempts and WAF evasion; Amazon MadPot saw a probe on 17 October and multiple PoCs from 02:00 UTC on 21 October; no confirmed compromise published and not yet in CISA KEV. Review activity back to 17 October. AWS Security Blog, The Register, BleepingComputer, CISA
- PHP Foundation blames Chainguard for early patched builds: published 07:41 UTC on 21 October, more than six hours before release; Chainguard says it found the bugs independently with AI. The Register
- 32 UK government services offline: plus four partly; precautionary, no confirmed compromise; sites in Germany, France, Belgium, Finland and the Netherlands also pulled. The Register
- Appliances: PAN-OS affected, Fortinet and Cisco investigating: all PAN-OS and Panorama versions affected, no fixed releases yet; Fortinet cleared 12 products including FortiOS, 12 under review; Cisco reviewing 31 products and services. Help Net Security
- GitLab CVE-2026-110264, CVSS 10.0: unauthenticated RCE via the bundled Onigmo regex engine, all self-managed versions since 7.0; backports to 18.11.13, 19.0.10, 19.1.9, 19.2.9; servers patched on 12 October need updating again; no exploitation reported. The Hacker News, The Register
- ConnectWise follow-up: Microsoft names Storm-0940: China-aligned actor used ARTEX AI agents and stolen ConnectWise app identities against 2,250+ Microsoft 365 tenants; privileged access in under three hours in some cases; persistence via app credential changes. Follow-up to Episodes 3 and 4. The Hacker News, The Register, The Record, Episode 4 notes
- Railway customer secrets exposure: encrypted and in some cases decrypted environment variables accessed; rotate secrets; crypto wallet drains reported by one researcher (moderate confidence). The Hacker News
- Two unpatched Linux KSMBD RCE flaws: CVSS 9.0, one pre-authentication on port 445; no mainline fix or CVE yet; disable KSMBD where not needed. The Hacker News
- Node.js security releases: Brotli decoder flaw (possible RCE, PoC only crashes standard builds) and nine others; 22.23.4, 24.22.1, 26.12.1; also blocks the eMudhra keys. The Hacker News
- QPACK flaws crash HTTP/3 servers: memory amplification in 7 of 10 stacks tested; fixes for quic-go, quiche, lsquic, Wireshark. The Hacker News
- Cyberattack on Columbia, South Carolina: city services platform down; emergency services and water running. The Record
- INTERPOL Operation Serengeti III: 1,462 arrests across 21 countries, US$105 million recovered. The Hacker News, The Record
AI security
- LiteLLM root cause: GitHub tokens in AI gateway logs: attacker reached an internet-exposed internal LiteLLM deployment and harvested GitHub CLI tokens from logged response bodies; LiteLLM says Claude Code embedded the tokens (LiteLLM's account only; Anthropic has not commented). Wiz saw stolen AWS credentials tested against Bedrock. LiteLLM, The Hacker News, Help Net Security
- OpenCode MCP sign-in flaw: malicious MCP server could run PowerShell on Windows and WSL; fixed in 1.18.33 with no CVE or advisory. The Hacker News
- ARTEX AI framework in wide use: Microsoft sees multiple regions' actors using it. The Hacker News
- AI-found bugs outpacing disclosure: PHP2Shell found with AI by Calif, Wiz and OpenAI and independently by Chainguard; KSMBD flaws found by an AI scanner. The Register, The Hacker News
Industry and strategic
- eMudhra exits global TLS certificate business: Chrome distrusts emSign ECC Root CA - G3 from the morning of 27 October (US Pacific); about 30,800 certificates affected, mostly InCommon. Follow-up to Episodes 6 and 7. The Hacker News, The Record, The Register
- Meta ordered to pay US$25 billion in New Mexico: Cambridge Analytica case; appeal planned. The Hacker News
- Vendor launches: SentinelOne runtime detection for AI agents; Claude Security continuous scanning. Help Net Security, Help Net Security
Outlook and patch priorities
- Critical (today): finish PHP patching (8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, 8.2.35), restart workers, assess internet-facing PHP hosts from 17 October; restrict internet-facing PAN-OS management interfaces; upgrade self-managed GitLab.
- High (this week): replace eMudhra ECC certificates before 27 October; Node.js updates; rotate Railway secrets; disable unneeded KSMBD; review AI gateway logging and redaction; upgrade OpenCode on Windows; ConnectWise customers review Entra ID app credentials and role changes since 15 October.
- Watch: confirmed PHP2Shell compromises and a KEV listing; fixed PAN-OS releases; KSMBD kernel fix; Anthropic response on LiteLLM's token finding.
Indicators
- PHP2Shell (Amazon, investigate rather than block, shared anonymisation infrastructure): 103.216.220[.]92 (17 Oct), 31.223.184[.]166, 37.19.200[.]5, 134.209.159[.]64, 103.114.163[.]188, 95.217.98[.]37 (21 Oct). POST requests carrying PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS; single memory-limit fatal errors; PHP workers spawning shells.
- Storm-0940 password spray infrastructure (Microsoft): 144.172.64[.]99 (10 to 14 Oct).
- LiteLLM 1.107.0: lookalike repo Berri-AI/litellm; /tmp/remote_code_loader.lock; cook.pth and sitecustomize.py in site-packages.