Cloudflare Reports Millions of PHP Exploit Attempts

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company’s network recorded millions of attempts to exploit newly disclosed vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, following a rapid rise in activity after the flaws became public. His figures describe attempted exploitation across Cloudflare’s network, not confirmed successful breaches. Prince said thousands of attempts were detected in the 10 hours before public disclosure. The count rose to tens of thousands within 45 minutes afterward, reached hundreds of thousands within two hours and had climbed to millions by his October 22 post on X. The figures come from Prince’s account of Cloudflare network activity. The vulnerabilities, known as php2shell, affect PHP software and may allow denial of service, remote code execution or data exposure when a server processes specially crafted HTTP traffic. PHP developers released security fixes and urged users to update the software. The flaws affect the PHP runtime, so updating website code or plugins alone does not address them. Cloudflare said it had developed web application firewall protections before the public disclosure and deployed them about nine hours in advance. Customers using...