Hackers pile on PHP2Shell as AWS reveals attacks began before disclosure
Cloudflare reports millions of exploit attempts, while Amazon spotted attackers trying their luck four days before patches landed
Hackers are bombarding servers with millions of attempts to exploit critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities, revealing that the attacks began four days before the flaws were publicly disclosed. Amazon reported that someone attempted to exploit PHP2Shell on October 17, four days before the patches were released. Cloudflare, a cloud computing company, has observed a surge in attacks targeting the two vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, since details began circulating earlier this week.
The company's CEO, Matthew Prince, stated that their systems detected thousands of exploitation attempts within the first 10 hours of the vulnerabilities being announced, which jumped to tens of thousands within 45 minutes, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and has since climbed into the millions.
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