PHP Issues Emergency Patches for Critical PHP2Shell RCE Flaws as Exploit Attempts Emerge
PHP has released urgent patches for two critical vulnerabilities collectively known as PHP2Shell that enable unauthenticated remote code execution on affected servers. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, score 9.2 on CVSS v4.0 and have already seen active exploitation attempts with malicious payloads adjusted to bypass WAF rules. The issues affect multiple PHP deployment methods including Apache with mod_php, PHP-FPM, php-cgi, FrankenPHP, and LiteSpeed, and do not require complex application code to be exploitable. CVE-2026-109618 involves a memory corruption chain leading to code execution under the web process privileges, while CVE-2026-109619 stems from an obsolete global state issue causing use-after-free conditions that can result in memory disclosure and code execution. Patched versions include PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35, with administrators advised to restart all persistent workers after updating. Temporary mitigations such as setting memory_limit to -1 and disabling session.upload_progress.enabled are available for environments that cannot patch immediately.
HispasecOct 22, 2026Translated from Spanish