Rants about politics. Principal Consulting Engineer. @joomla contributor. Pronoun: He/Him
London
Joined December 2009
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George Wilson retweeted
If all the govs shutting down servers for a PHP update, all the hosters & enterprises terrified by the vuln, gave $100k, or just $50k a year to the PHP Foundation, things could look very differently. Go, make your employer sponsor *today* thephp.foundation/sponsor/ #php #phpc @ThePHPF
Calling in @iProov !
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: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
George Wilson retweeted
they’re calling it “Black October” and i don’t think people realize how serious this is
in the last 48 hours there have been over 27 major cybersecurity incidents. not in a month. not in a week. in 48 hours
any ONE of these would normally be the biggest story of the year
PHP: critical vulnerability in the software running 80% of the web. severity 9.2 out of 10
Node.js: high-severity flaw letting attackers take over servers remotely. affects versions 22, 24, and 26
Java: also compromised. three of the most used programming languages on earth hit at the same time
GitLab: a perfect 10 out of 10 severity hole in every version since 2014
Railway: hosting platform compromised. API keys for OpenAI, Claude, Stripe potentially exposed
Signal: a bug that could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up
WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker’s keys and planted backdoors on websites
LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer
and that’s not even half the list
thousands of AI agent swarms are reportedly scanning and attacking vulnerable servers right now. automated. around the clock
security researchers are saying this might be the early stages of a global cyber incident that nobody fully understands yet
if you run a website, use cloud services, store API keys on hosting platforms, or use any software built on PHP, Node.js, or Java you are potentially affected
update everything. rotate your API keys. change your passwords on critical services. enable 2FA everywhere you haven’t already
this is not a normal week on the internet. this is something different
George Wilson retweeted
"On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure."
thephp.foundation/blog/2026/…
George Wilson retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
George Wilson retweeted
🔐 Node.js security updates are now available!
New releases for Node.js 22.x, 24.x & 26.x address multiple vulnerabilities, including high-severity issues.
Review the details and update your systems to stay secure.
🔗 nodejs.org/en/blog/vulnerabi…
#NodeJS #Security
George Wilson retweeted
Crazy 72 hours in security. Three major incidents dropped back-to-back: eMudhra, PingCAP (TiDB Cloud), and PHP.
Here is the short version of what happened and who got hit.
1. eMudhra (Trusted CA compromise)
eMudhra generated 8 intermediate CA certificates in April 2025 (cross-signed by Sectigo). A bug in their HSM key-wrapping test script created a second set of P-384 keys where the private keys were single-byte numbers under 256. Operators picked the wrong key labels and signed them into real CA certs.
One of the intermediate CA private keys was literally the number 4.
The other seven: 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237.
Three weeks later (May 2025), their CRL signatures started failing because the CRL signer was using the real keys instead of the weak ones. Instead of asking why the keys didn't match, someone switched the CRL signer to the weak keys and closed the ticket.
• Browsers are safe: Chrome, Firefox, Apple, and Microsoft already blocked them, and zero rogue certs hit CT logs.
• Servers are not: curl, Python (certifi), Go binaries, and Docker base images don't check CRLs. Update ca-certificates, certifi, and Go (1.27.3 / 1.26.10).
• 10-second check on any server:
curl dv-g3b-emudhra.we-have-a-pro…
(TLS error = safe. 200 OK = still vulnerable.)
2. PingCAP / TiDB Cloud (10.6 TB breach)
Attackers found GCP and Azure credentials committed inside PingCAP's own repos. They set up a replication feed of TiDB Cloud's production control plane and exported the entire database every 6 hours for 22 straight days. 88 full exports, zero alerts. 200 GB is already out on torrents.
Beyond the 413 private repos and 20.6M customer SQL queries logged from their web SQL Editor, PingCAP engineers were pasting customer secrets into Jira tickets.
Who is affected in the leaked records:
• Live credentials exposed in support tickets:
- Pinterest: AWS keys for their pingcap-logs S3 bucket
- CardX / Silverlake (NPCI-linked env): AWS admin key in a backup log with full access to 258 external S3 buckets
- DeBank: 38 presigned S3 URLs
- An unnamed AI/dev platform: a 314 MB slow-query log attached to a ticket containing 8,027 live customer secrets (an AWS root key, a GitHub admin PAT over 1,701 repos, 7,485 AWS STS tokens, and 192 OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini keys)
• Tenants with infra metadata, VPC CIDRs, app-server IPs, or contract pricing exposed:
- Tech: Atlassian, Databricks, Airbnb, Baidu, LINE, Nylas, Persona, PatSnap
- E-comm & Travel: Booking.com, Shopee, Flipkart, Mercari, ZOZO, AEON, Delhivery, Klook
- Gaming: Capcom, Square Enix, Konami, Bandai Namco, Cygames, Colopl, DMM
- Finance: PayPay, SoftBank, SBI, SB Payment Service, Fujitsu, TOPPAN, Bank of China, China Life
- Crypto: Bitget (said only public trade logs were on it and they already left), Pionex, DigiPlus, NFTscan, Chainbase
• Developer profiles leaked (from a purchased reo.dev table in PingCAP's BigQuery):
- 24,900 personal emails + GitHub/LinkedIn profiles of engineers at Tencent (3,327), Huawei (2,726), ByteDance (2,475), AIG (2,140), Mastercard, Flipkart, and bKash.
If you use TiDB Cloud: rotate your console API keys, DB passwords, and anything you ever pasted into a support ticket.
3. PHP "PHP2Shell" (CVE-2026-109618 & CVE-2026-109619)
Two CVSS 9.2 pre-auth RCEs leaked yesterday ahead of today's 14:00 UTC patch.
Public writeups trace it to a heap Use-After-Free in PHP's native C multipart/form-data session upload-progress handler (ext/session/session.c).
Because C-level multipart parsing runs before line 1 of index.php:
• App auth, Laravel/WordPress middleware, and file_uploads = Off do not stop it.
• Only PHP 8.2–8.5 get official patches today (59% of PHP servers on Shodan are on EOL <= 8.1).
• Until you patch php-fpm: lock php_admin_flag[session.upload_progress.enabled] = off and block unexpected multipart requests at Nginx/Apache/Cloudflare.
George Wilson retweeted
Yeah this is bad. An unauthenticated remote-code-execution exploit for *any* PHP version out there, with simple scripts. You need to patch ASAP.
Or even take stuff offline in the meantime. Looks like POCs are out there already.
Doomsday scenario for PHP 🤯
George Wilson retweeted
‼️ PHP UPDATE: The Dutch parliament, the Dutch national cyber agency and Finland's central government have pulled websites offline ahead of the PHP patch.
Finland's state IT centre Valtori is shutting down public-facing central government web services. The National Land Survey of Finland is already down.
In the Netherlands, the Tweede Kamer, the NCSC and the Dutch Data Protection Authority are offline. So are tech site Tweakers and NotuBiz, which runs council information for 100+ local governments.
The University of Vienna switched off its websites, webmail and Moodle. The University of Freiburg and Finland's Haaga-Helia have taken services down too.
Fur Affinity, Pinboard, explain xkcd and every wiki on Miraheze are dark as well.
Valtori says its shutdown is a precaution, not the result of an attack or breach.
PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, it initially stood for Personal Home Page
PHP's fix is due at 14:00 UTC today.
George Wilson retweeted
Russia's unrelenting attacks on Ukraine and the intentional targeting of civilians proves that Putin has zero intention of ending this war. He is a war criminal and a menace to the civilized world, and should be treated as such.
George Wilson retweeted
A month ago Trump signed a tough Russia sanctions law. One call with Putin later, he's lifting sanctions on Russian diesel, demanding Kyiv stop hitting Russian refineries, and telling Ukraine to get "a new leader." His big "energy ceasefire"? Russian drones hit Kharkiv within hours.
Putin humiliates Trump every chance he gets. Why does Trump allow it? 🤔
George Wilson retweeted
.@elonmusk please tell me these overnight disruptions to Starlink terminals in Ukraine were unintended - that @SpaceX is doing everything it can to fix a temporary glitch.
I'm confident this does not reflect a change in SpaceX policy because if so, intentionally degrading Ukraine's ability to defend itself might be construed as aiding and abetting a mass murderer. Can you confirm that's not SpaceX’s intent?
Ukrainians simply want to live in peace. They did not ask Putin to bomb their homes, schools and hospitals. They do not want Putin to kidnap and brainwash their children. They are not interested in destroying energy infrastructure - in Ukraine or in Russia. They only want to defend their country and live their lives.
Supporting Ukrainian sovereignty - or at the very least, allowing for it - should not be a gray area for the U.S. government or for American corporations. Can you clarify the SpaceX position?
nbcnews.com/world/ukraine/uk…
George Wilson retweeted
Russian Federation, national parliament election today: Europe Elects is not reporting results to avoid legitimizing a manipulated vote. #Duma2026
George Wilson retweeted
MCP 2026-07-28 is live and it's the largest update to the protocol since launch.
MCP is now stateless, making it easier to deploy and scale remote servers.
claude.com/blog/bringing-mcp…
George Wilson retweeted
NEW: Am told Keir Starmer wrote handwritten notes for every single member of No 10 staff - in the hundreds - thanking them for their public service
George Wilson retweeted
I will accept Nigel Farage’s request to be appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.
It is a farce and a desperate distraction, and the people of Clacton deserve better.
But if he wants to spend the summer arguing with a bin, I won't stop him.
It's so depressing that Poland isn't even a favourite. Her voice is incredible #Eurovisión2026
George Wilson retweeted
These thoughts have been on my mind for months: stitcher.io/blog/php-biggest…
George Wilson retweeted
Today, we’re open-sourcing the draft specification for DESIGN.md, so it can be used across any tool or platform. We’re also adding new capabilities.
DESIGN.md lets you easily export and import your design rules from project to project. Instead of guessing intent, agents know exactly what a color is for and can even validate their choices against WCAG accessibility rules.
Watch David East break down this shared visual language in action👇. New capabilities and links in 🧵