Hackers exploited PHP vulnerabilities four days before public patch release
Security researchers confirmed that attackers began exploiting critical PHP flaws known as PHP2Shell on October 17, four days before the official patches were released.
Early exploitation attempts detected
Amazon Web Services analysts identified an attack attempt on Wednesday while reviewing activity on their honeypots. The initial exploit occurred on October 17 from an IP address linked to a commercial anonymization network. This activity happened before the public release of fixes for the two critical vulnerabilities.
Global response to the threat
Administrators and security staff raced to patch vulnerable websites and applications after the fixes were made public on Wednesday. Some governments took key websites down proactively to prevent them from being targeted before patches could be applied. Attackers reverse engineered the released fixes to learn how to exploit the flaws further.
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