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🧵Yesterday may prove to be a turning point for security. AI is making vulnerability research dramatically faster. This favors attackers: they can find vulns and exploits at machine speed, while organizations must still inventory systems, test updates, and deploy patches without breaking production. PHP2Shell shows what that looks like. On August 11, researchers reported critical flaws in PHP runtime. They had existed for more than a decade and affects versions from PHP 5.4. An unauthenticated attacker could potentially execute code remotely, read process memory containing passwords, tokens, and API keys...🫠 Both vulnerabilities are rated CVSS 9.2. PHP powers roughly 70% of websites, totalling millions of servers. The researchers disclosed the bugs responsibly. Fixing them took about 70 days. The fix touchs 300+ files and changed nearly 12,000 lines. These were not simple mistakes. The disclosure then broke down. Amazon saw an apparent exploitation attempt on October 17, four days before the public release. This indicates a first leak. On October 20, the CVE identifiers leaked. The next morning, a supplier with advance access published patched container images more than six hours early, giving attackers a chance to study the fix while most defenders were still waiting. The official releases arrived at 14:00 UTC. Exploitation followed immediately. Cloudflare reported thousands of attempts in the ten hours before the announcement, tens of thousands in the first 45 minutes, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions later that day. Organizations that could not patch immediately had incomplete options: WAF rules, isolation, or taking services offline. Government portals, universities, and hospitals across Europe did exactly that. Large teams with accurate inventories and automated deployment could respond in hours. Many others still do not know where PHP is running: an old site, a vendor appliance, a forgotten container, or an unsupported internal application. AI did not make software insecure. It always was insecure. AI just changed the economics of finding and exploiting bugs and compressed the gap between disclosure and mass exploitation from days to minutes. Patching faster will not be enough. Critical systems need continuous inventory, automatic updates, isolation, memory-safe languages where possible. Our last bastion is software whose security can be demonstrated rather than assumed: formal verification, cryptography, memory-safe architectures, and secure hardware. The era in which complexity provided accidental protection is ending. PHP2Shell is not an isolated crisis. It is a preview.
This is insane. We cannot allow AI agents to go into your bank account and act independently without your authorization. But that is what’s happening right now. Left unchecked, AI could endanger the entire global financial system — including your bank account. Pause AI NOW!
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to re…
V12 found 25 vulnerabilities in the x402 protocol. Critical findings included: - Requests approved without any payment - Maliciously high requests being paid by default - Session takeover from relayed login signatures Here's how. 🧵
clanker will be maintained by the @masknetwork / Firefly team moving forward they have exciting plans and strong partners lined up to support clanker’s next chapter for things going forward, please reach out to @suji_yan thank you all for your continued support clank clank
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SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: https://www.axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and http://Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Important update for the entire XMTP community: XMTP is becoming an open-source messaging stack you can run yourself. Please read this post for all of the details, changes, and plans for the future https://blog.xmtp.org/future-of-xmtp/
Art Basel Paris 2026: a reality check for digital art. After speaking with Karim Crippa, the fair’s new director, one thing stuck with me: the Grand Palais wasn’t ready to host #Zero10 due to space constraints. But is space really the whole story? My take 🧵
