There's also a tweet by Matthew Prince that says Cloudflare saw thousands of attempts pre-announcement, https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051, then tens of thousands post announcement, and now millions.
Unfortunately, if you read the announcement as referring to 14:00 UTC, that's several hours after Chainguard published their images. I don't know if it's plausible that people saw the Chainguard builds, understood the issue from those and built exploits, but a precise timeline would help understand better.
https://x.com/dok2001/status/2112811965735202970 was posted at 7:43 AM UTC on October 21, 2026, and Chainguard (according to the PHP Foundation blog post) shipped at 7:41 UTC. One of the big reasons Chainguard broke the embargo was because Cloudflare had been seeing attacks, IIRC.
The Cloudflare one refers to the time period after the leak where people had already made PoCs. Amazon’s detection is days earlier which is quite concerning.
So either there was another (but non-public) leak or someone else discovered the exploit almost at the same time as it was about to be published. I guess the latter is much less likely because it would be a major coincidence.
The attacker may have known about the exploit for a long time and were saving it, but upon finding out that it was about to be disclosed, they decided it was now or never.
I’ve seen probing for it in server logs but not actual exploiting of it. I think the botnets added it to their vulnerability scanners but I have yet to see any examples of an actual working exploit. There are hundreds of vibe coded attempts on github but none of them work to the best of my knowledge. Would love someone to prove me wrong here.
Also this post from Amazon is embarrassing. They knew about it from the 17th yet failed to meet the embargo timeline and patch Amazon Linux (their patch is due to be released today the 22nd of Oct).
I don’t know when various parts of Amazon learned about it, but I don’t think this post means they knew about it on Oct 17. I think they looked at past logs from their honeypots and found a probe for php2shell happened on Oct 17.
What makes you think they knew about it from the 17th? "...dating to Oct. 17, 2026" means that's when it happened. It doesn't mean they identified it on the 17th.
Do they differentiate between attempts and successful infiltration? I’m trying to understand whether this exploit is easy to use or not. There was an article here from yesterday that argued the exploit was not easy to use and needed LFI
So Amazon knew about this exploit and that it was actively being used several days before the release of any patches. Despite this they still took 18 hours AFTER the release of the patches to provide updated version of their Amazon Linux packages?
My reading here is that they've gone through their logs retrospectively, because you can see these attempts to exploit pretty clearly in an observability platform, and the 17th is only five days ago, so you can assume they've got a lot of fully detailed logs over that period.
If this is only a retrospective find then they should make it more clear, from the blog it reads to me as promoting their MadPot tool for detection pre CVE disclosure:
"Subsequently, from 2026-10-21 0200 UTC to 2026-10-21 0800 UTC, Amazon Threat Intelligence identified additional exploitation attempts of PHP2Shell targeting MadPot from additional anonymized infrastructure." (i.e almost 12 hours before the release of the patch)
"Invest in detections that don’t rely on a signature for a specific CVE. The first exploitation will often come before those signatures exist."
"We analyze over 200 billion events per minute and integrate threat intelligence from our MadPot honeypot network to identify and block known exploitation attempts in real time. Our honeypot system provides us with early detection of exploitation attempts, enabling rapid response and threat analysis."
It's a upstream targeted fix that was made available significantly faster in packages/images maintained by volunteers, it's not some untested downstream patch. Customers at this point would have likely taken their applications offline over this issue so it would have been difficult to make the situation any worse.
Any vendor that delivers updated packages without thorough regression testing that causes an incident for their customers as a result will get a thrashing from HNers.
Isn't it typical for researchers who find these prolific RCEs to create their CVEs and then in the interim submit a bunch of bugs to vulnerable hosts and collect bounties?
All these tech companies are school children comparing how much better their bike is than the others, but they've all got the exact same bike, and that bike is a massive vulnerability that they did nothing to fix, but they're all bragging about how they saw it first or identified it first.
To the person at amazon that thought this was a good press release to put out, I know this is what you were hoping for, so here it is, "wow, so cool". Not sure why, but AI really has everyone running around with desperate loser aura.
Maybe next time, do better, actually patch some things so your customers are covered?
There's also a tweet by Matthew Prince that says Cloudflare saw thousands of attempts pre-announcement, https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051, then tens of thousands post announcement, and now millions.
Unfortunately, if you read the announcement as referring to 14:00 UTC, that's several hours after Chainguard published their images. I don't know if it's plausible that people saw the Chainguard builds, understood the issue from those and built exploits, but a precise timeline would help understand better.
https://x.com/dok2001/status/2112811965735202970 was posted at 7:43 AM UTC on October 21, 2026, and Chainguard (according to the PHP Foundation blog post) shipped at 7:41 UTC. One of the big reasons Chainguard broke the embargo was because Cloudflare had been seeing attacks, IIRC.
The Cloudflare one refers to the time period after the leak where people had already made PoCs. Amazon’s detection is days earlier which is quite concerning.
So either there was another (but non-public) leak or someone else discovered the exploit almost at the same time as it was about to be published. I guess the latter is much less likely because it would be a major coincidence.
The attacker may have known about the exploit for a long time and were saving it, but upon finding out that it was about to be disclosed, they decided it was now or never.
I’ve seen probing for it in server logs but not actual exploiting of it. I think the botnets added it to their vulnerability scanners but I have yet to see any examples of an actual working exploit. There are hundreds of vibe coded attempts on github but none of them work to the best of my knowledge. Would love someone to prove me wrong here.
Also this post from Amazon is embarrassing. They knew about it from the 17th yet failed to meet the embargo timeline and patch Amazon Linux (their patch is due to be released today the 22nd of Oct).
I don’t know when various parts of Amazon learned about it, but I don’t think this post means they knew about it on Oct 17. I think they looked at past logs from their honeypots and found a probe for php2shell happened on Oct 17.
What makes you think they knew about it from the 17th? "...dating to Oct. 17, 2026" means that's when it happened. It doesn't mean they identified it on the 17th.
Do they differentiate between attempts and successful infiltration? I’m trying to understand whether this exploit is easy to use or not. There was an article here from yesterday that argued the exploit was not easy to use and needed LFI
So Amazon knew about this exploit and that it was actively being used several days before the release of any patches. Despite this they still took 18 hours AFTER the release of the patches to provide updated version of their Amazon Linux packages?
https://github.com/amazonlinux/amazon-linux-2023/issues/1148
I don't think this blog post is sending the message AWS intended...
My reading here is that they've gone through their logs retrospectively, because you can see these attempts to exploit pretty clearly in an observability platform, and the 17th is only five days ago, so you can assume they've got a lot of fully detailed logs over that period.
What makes you think they knew about it on the 17th? Scanning old logs is not the same as understanding them as they're generated.
If this is only a retrospective find then they should make it more clear, from the blog it reads to me as promoting their MadPot tool for detection pre CVE disclosure:
"Subsequently, from 2026-10-21 0200 UTC to 2026-10-21 0800 UTC, Amazon Threat Intelligence identified additional exploitation attempts of PHP2Shell targeting MadPot from additional anonymized infrastructure." (i.e almost 12 hours before the release of the patch)
"Invest in detections that don’t rely on a signature for a specific CVE. The first exploitation will often come before those signatures exist."
"We analyze over 200 billion events per minute and integrate threat intelligence from our MadPot honeypot network to identify and block known exploitation attempts in real time. Our honeypot system provides us with early detection of exploitation attempts, enabling rapid response and threat analysis."
Take a peek at my detailed full-ish timeline of every actor around the embargo and leak, just added amazon's reporting in there as well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50190603
What did crowdsec see? Anybody know? Php exploits should be on a fast track of alerting, given the wide installation base.
Why haven’t they fixed Amazon Linux then?
Same as none of their AMIs for bottlerocket have emSign revocations.
Absolutely shit company who puts their customers at risk.
-1: if the fix breaks customers in other ways, they're screwed as well. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
It's a upstream targeted fix that was made available significantly faster in packages/images maintained by volunteers, it's not some untested downstream patch. Customers at this point would have likely taken their applications offline over this issue so it would have been difficult to make the situation any worse.
Nearly every other vendor has pushed fixes for it, including where they pull their upstream stuff from. There's no excuse.
Any vendor that delivers updated packages without thorough regression testing that causes an incident for their customers as a result will get a thrashing from HNers.
Hope is not a strategy.
Isn't it typical for researchers who find these prolific RCEs to create their CVEs and then in the interim submit a bunch of bugs to vulnerable hosts and collect bounties?
All these tech companies are school children comparing how much better their bike is than the others, but they've all got the exact same bike, and that bike is a massive vulnerability that they did nothing to fix, but they're all bragging about how they saw it first or identified it first.
To the person at amazon that thought this was a good press release to put out, I know this is what you were hoping for, so here it is, "wow, so cool". Not sure why, but AI really has everyone running around with desperate loser aura.
Maybe next time, do better, actually patch some things so your customers are covered?