Tag: vulnerabilities

The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable

Posted on by faz_business


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As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs, criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild. Millions of exploitation attempts hit within hours of the vulnerabilities being published, according to analysis from Cloudflare—unsurprising given broad access to AI tools that can make it easier for attackers to quickly exploit flaws.

So far, the nightmare scenario of mass victim takeovers and breaches hasn’t come to pass. The PHP Foundation says it hasn’t seen any successful exploitation of the bugs, collectively dubbed PHP2Shell, and many publicly circulating potential exploits appear to be ineffective. However, perhaps the most interesting role of AI amid the chaos this week is how advanced models helped researchers uncover practical exploitations for the vulnerabilities, which were known about, at least in part, for years. In other words, AI helped turn historic vulnerability into a current crisis.

So are we all about to be walloped by a wave of critical vulnerabilities that have been kicking around for decades?

Researchers at security company Calif were the first to identify the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities and create exploits in early August—partially using frontier AI tools as part of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program, but also using expert human knowledge of PHP, its dynamics, and its weaknesses. Some of the underlying issues were identified in 2024 but were deemed too complex to exploit at the time. Following Calif’s discovery, researchers at OpenAI and the Google-owned security firm Wiz independently discovered PHP2Shell flaws using AI tools.

“The vulnerability had been known to the PHP team for years, but because it could not be leveraged by an attacker—at least, not a human one—it was not addressed,” says Sagi Tzadik, a security researcher at Wiz.

No software is perfect. There are inevitably flaws in even the most critical, foundational digital tools, but the expanding capabilities of AI models have made it faster to analyze and potentially exploit vulnerabilities. This puts even more pressure on under-resourced IT teams, developers, and admins to keep up. Microsoft’s security updates included a record 1,453 security vulnerabilities this month alone. Meanwhile, Bank of America recently hired 1,000 consultants to fix flaws discovered by Anthropic’s Mythos. Security researchers emphasize, though, that AI is ultimately not doing anything new, but rather magnifying existing dynamics of vulnerability discovery and coordinated disclosure.

Stealthy Malware Has Infected Thousands of Linux Systems for Years

Posted on by faz_business


Other discussions include: Reddit, Stack Overflow (Spanish), forobeta (Spanish), brainycp (Russian), natnetwork (Indonesian), Proxmox (Deutsch), Camel2243 (Chinese), svrforum (Korean), exabytes, virtualmin, serverfault and many others.

After exploiting a vulnerability or misconfiguration, the exploit code downloads the main payload from a server, which, in most cases, has been hacked by the attacker and converted into a channel for distributing the malware anonymously. An attack that targeted the researchers’ honeypot named the payload httpd. Once executed, the file copies itself from memory to a new location in the /temp directory, runs it, and then terminates the original process and deletes the downloaded binary.

Once moved to the /tmp directory, the file executes under a different name, which mimics the name of a known Linux process. The file hosted on the honeypot was named sh. From there, the file establishes a local command-and-control process and attempts to gain root system rights by exploiting CVE-2021-4043, a privilege-escalation vulnerability that was patched in 2021 in Gpac, a widely used open source multimedia framework.

The malware goes on to copy itself from memory to a handful of other disk locations, once again using names that appear as routine system files. The malware then drops a rootkit, a host of popular Linux utilities that have been modified to serve as rootkits, and the miner. In some cases, the malware also installs software for “proxy-jacking,” the term for surreptitiously routing traffic through the infected machine so the true origin of the data isn’t revealed.

The researchers continued:

As part of its command-and-control operation, the malware opens a Unix socket, creates two directories under the /tmp directory, and stores data there that influences its operation. This data includes host events, locations of the copies of itself, process names, communication logs, tokens, and additional log information. Additionally, the malware uses environment variables to store data that further affects its execution and behavior.

All the binaries are packed, stripped, and encrypted, indicating significant efforts to bypass defense mechanisms and hinder reverse engineering attempts. The malware also uses advanced evasion techniques, such as suspending its activity when it detects a new user in the btmp or utmp files and terminating any competing malware to maintain control over the infected system.

By extrapolating data such as the number of Linux servers connected to the internet across various services and applications, as tracked by services such as Shodan and Censys, the researchers estimate that the number of machines infected by Perfctl is measured in the thousands. They say that the pool of vulnerable machines—meaning those that have yet to install the patch for CVE-2023-33426 or contain a vulnerable misconfiguration—is in the millions. The researchers have yet to measure the amount of cryptocurrency the malicious miners have generated.

People who want to determine if their device has been targeted or infected by Perfctl should look for indicators of compromise included in Thursday’s post. They should also be on the lookout for unusual spikes in CPU usage or sudden system slowdowns, particularly if they occur during idle times. Thursday’s report also provides steps for preventing infections in the first place.

This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.