Information Arbitrageur (InfoSec, OSINT, SOCMINT, Alternative Data, FinTech) and OG cypherpunk.

Greater Chicagoland Area
Joined June 2008
William Knowles retweeted
As an industry, cybersecurity shows neither consensus nor an ability to accurately predict the likelihood that adversaries will exploit a given vulnerability, or the impact if they do. This is especially true for the ones labelled ‘critical.’ The culture of guessing is ending. We must aspire to become an industry capable of forecasting exploitation, quantifying impact, and being held to it. The data is available, and the path forward is paved by evidence.
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William Knowles retweeted
This story is eliciting some wild, next-level hysteria on X and in the gov (washingtonpost.com/technolog…). Did people not understand what occurred? Or am I missing something? Also, a quote from @alexstamos that originally appeared in the story has been removed. See highlight below 👇
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William Knowles retweeted
Update: Our PHP exploit is now production-grade. * stock php.ini-production, display_errors=off, normal memory_limit, multi-worker, ASLR, under load * ARM64 + x86-64 targets * MediaWiki, WordPress, phpBB, Laravel * Apache/mod_php and nginx/php-fpm -> root xitter.cf/dguido/status/21131291…
Re: the widely circulated blog claiming the PHP bugs aren't easily exploitable: @trailofbits has a working exploit that gets a shell on an unmodified MediaWiki installation. eliastaylor.com/noexploit/
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William Knowles retweeted
Explain to me why you can’t do WiFi upgrades overnight @Xfinity and instead do them as people are waking up and trying to get to work?
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William Knowles retweeted
Does anyone remember the time in the 90s when people thought the antivirus vendors were releasing viruses so companies had to buy their products? Now AI is finding vulnerabilities, writing exploits, and creating threats so fast that the only way to defend yourself is to buy more AI. It’s starting to feel like the 90s all over again.
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William Knowles retweeted
Someone has mistaken an "exploit scan" with "in-the-wild exploit". They went and broke embargo on a high profile vulnerability disclosure. That person works for you.
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William Knowles retweeted
Someone bought a really badass domain name and made a sweet landing page for a vibevuln in your product. No one actually knows if the bug is exploitable or impactful yet but it has gone viral anyways, enjoy your weekend
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William Knowles retweeted
Someone just hid a $500 bitcoin key on a server running PHP from before the PHP2Shell patches — the RCE an OpenAI model found last week — and dared the internet to take it. The AI-discovered bug is now a live public bounty. stealmybitcoin.com/
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William Knowles retweeted
Update on PHP situation from Google Threat Intel
A brief update on the critical vulnerabilities in PHP:  We have not yet validated exploitation in the wild and we have no evidence of successful wide scale exploitation. There are currently several exploit PoCs publicly circulating, many of which appear to be "vibe-coded" and are incapable of remote code execution. We have validated some PoCs, however, that are capable of RCE against default deployments of mod_php but not PHP-FPM. Nonetheless, exploitation may have already begun in a limited fashion and the threat is viable and very serious. Defenders should: ​1) Patch & Restart by upgrading to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, or 8.2.35 and restarting web services ​2) Layer Temporary Safeguards at the network edge (WAF/proxy rules) and server configuration level if immediate patching requires a maintenance window ​3) Protect Credentials by monitoring for abnormal session traffic and rotating keys and passwords on compromised internet-facing PHP systems exposed prior to patching 🔗 We are continually updating our Cloud Security blog post on this topic with real-world guidance and actionable defense strategies as we learn more. Please keep monitoring these posts for updates as you prioritize your patching efforts: cloud.google.com/blog/produc…  🔗 Technical details from Wiz: wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rc… 🔗 Details of the exposure from VirusTotal: blog.virustotal.com/2026/10/…
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William Knowles retweeted
The USNA Glee Club’s National Anthem will always give you chills🇺🇸
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William Knowles retweeted
In the 4 days since php2shell was published: * 1,448 more CVEs published. * No published exploit code for any in Metasploit or Exploit-DB. * VulnCheck added 25 on its KEV list. 24 are old bugs. * CISA added just 1 to its KEV list, the only new bug anyone has seen adversaries exploit. Nothing in the record shows AI or anything else driving up how many vuln adversaries exploit, or how fast. Adversaries keep working a small set of bugs until those stop paying, and only then move on. Patch php2shell because there are too many eyes are on it not to. Then apply the same rule to everything else, prioritize patching all systems against what adversaries exploit. It sounds simple, and the evidence says it’s what we still haven’t done that actually works.
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William Knowles retweeted
Get an AppleTV and do the following if you have a Samsung TV (or really any modern TV) and avoid the spyware: 1. Disable automatic Samsung Smart Hub launch. On 2025 models, Samsung documents Settings → All Settings → Advanced Features → Start Screen Options → Start with Smart Hub Home → Off. On older models, look under General & Privacy → Start Screen Options. 2. Turn off Autorun Last App if present, to prevent Samsung TV Plus or another Tizen app from taking over startup. 3. Select your Apple TV HDMI input, then leave the TV on that input. 4. Enable HDMI-CEC in Samsung's settings (usually called Anynet+) and enable Control TVs and Receivers in Apple TV's remote settings. This should allow the Apple TV remote to wake the television and control its power. 5. Disconnect the Samsung TV from all internet access. Remove its Wi-Fi connection, and unplug Ethernet if present. Leave the Apple TV connected. Samsung explicitly documents the last-input behavior when Smart Hub autorun is disabled. The result should be that when you turn on your Apple TV, your Samsung displays that HDMI input directly, without the Samsung home screen.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners. Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads. Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was. Got a root shell. then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems. This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
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William Knowles retweeted
We should change it to "Cybersecurity Education Month" We are AWARE ENOUGH ALREADY JFC
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William Knowles retweeted
This is probably the wildest Cybersecurity Awareness Month campaign ive ever seen.
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William Knowles retweeted
Imagine being a CEO of an US energy company and thinking that you work with close associates of the Trump family, only to find out that behind them is a sanctioned Russian company, really pulling the strings. This happened in Alaska. Polar Train LNG's CEO, Joel Riddle, stepped down after finding out that the Russian "Novatek" company, which is under US sanctions, has been involved in a $25 billion energy project in Alaska. The CEO thought that he was working with Gentry Beach, a close friend of Donald Trump Junior. Reportedly, that project was also discussed between Witkoff and Jared Kushner when they were with Putin. The White House admitted that the project was talked about "briefly". We are witnessing the greatest corruption scandal the USA has ever witnessed. It all leads to Trump, his family and the Russians, and apparently they were even ready to sell riches of Alaska to the Russians. The people in Alaska just need to look over to Russia, where the richest regions in terms of minerals and hydrocarbon resources have been stripped-mined, transferring all the wealth to Moscow and Saint Petersburg and leaving a scarred landscape in extreme poverty. That is the result of rampant corruption. We are starting to see more details why Trump and his friends are trying so strongly to bully Ukraine into surrender. This is most certainly only the tip of the iceberg.
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William Knowles retweeted
Another way I explain it: have you ever received high or critical findings on a penetration test? That $50k penetration test that you had to wait for is now $50 in tokens and on-demand at effectively infinite supply to anyone. That's both great and terrifying at the same time.
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William Knowles retweeted
I'd be saying this kind of stuff too if I just learned that people can create gold from mercury now.
JUST IN: Peter Schiff says Bitcoin is going to crash to $75,000. "It's going to be a very long weekend for Bitcoiners."
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William Knowles retweeted
This is extremely important. The bug is very serious, but exploitation is not trivial.
I'll be the first to admit I'm mediocre at exploit development, but I am in contact with enough extremely talented exploit developers to say this for certain: Anyone claiming they were "easily" able to generate a working php2shell exploit with AI is either: a) a world-class exploit developer with an extreme case of imposter syndrome. b) currently looking at some very confident-sounding but wrong LLM output. I'm rather certain it's the latter based on the number of AI-hallucinated exploits I've seen posted on GitHub. Threat actors are also blasting my honeypot network with "php2shell" exploits that not only don't work, but aren't even within 10,000 miles of anything to do with how the exploit actually works. I've seen the same technique from the attached image in multiple alleged "php2shell exploits", including one on GitHub with over 100 stars. Problem is, it's not php2shell, nor is it even a vulnerability at all. It's a technique known as "session poisoning", which can be leveraged to exploit local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerabilities in PHP apps (not PHP itself). The only thing it has in common with CVE-2026-109618/CVE-2026-109619 is they both use the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" feature. And mitigation advice for both issues reference setting "session.upload_progress.enabled" to "Off". People are shoving loose details of the vulnerability into LLMs, the LLMs are keying in on the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" string, then generating session poisoning code that has nothing to do with the actual CVE. And because the people doing this have absolutely no idea what they're doing, they're confident enough to post their "proof of concept exploit" to GitHub and share it on social media. So if you see people talking about "session poisoning + LFI" it's likely their LLM hallucinated an exploit based on a 2018 blog by Orange Tsai talking about a local file inclusion attack vector. What's even worse is that "security researchers" are then using LLMs to triage these exploitation attempts, falling victim to the same hallucinations, then confirming there is ongoing mass-exploitation (there currently isn't). The actual real exploit is very difficult to exploit, and so far I've not seen anyone successfully get it working on more than a handful of PHP version with highly-specific configurations. LLMs are useful tools in the hands of skilled professionals, but for others, they're often just a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.
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William Knowles retweeted
the guy who banned use of php at amazon way back in the day is probably feeling pretty smug right now
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