Governments and cyber-security agencies worldwide are urging website operators to patch PHP2Shell, two critical PHP flaws tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Found with AI, the bugs enable remote code execution and Heartbleed-style memory disclosure. A fix arrived on Wednesday afternoon. 

Several agencies told organizations unable to patch in time to consider pulling their sites. Finland temporarily shut its government’s public web services. In the Netherlands, the cyber-security agency, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, and the Tweede Kamer, parliament’s lower house, all went offline. 

The US National Security Agency echoed this on X: “These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database.” The White House said federal agencies were working with leading AI labs to speed up a fix, while Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged people on X to check whether their public websites ran on PHP. 

“We have taken down a number of other systems as a precautionary measure until they can be safely patched,” the Wikimedia Foundation said, leaving parts of Wikipedia unreachable on Wednesday. Edinburgh council’s website and pages for BBC programmes, including Doctor Who and The Traitors, also went dark, though neither has confirmed a PHP link. DeviantArt said only that it was “temporarily down for maintenance.” 

How AI found CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 

Researchers at Calif and Wiz uncovered the flaws. Calif and the PHP Foundation were part of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program, which offered AI tools to find and fix PHP flaws. Wiz called them the “most severe vulnerabilities ever discovered” by AI. OpenAI described them as “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory,” adding that its own researcher spotted the issue around the same time. 

The bugs sat undetected for over a decade before surfacing August, after a few weeks of AI-assisted work. “Frontier models were critical to making this process practical, enabling us to develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours,” Wiz said. It estimates “roughly 70%” of the internet is affected; a figure not independently verified. 

The PHP Foundation planned to disclose PHP2Shell later this month with a full patch, but details leaked on social media on Tuesday, forcing a rushed announcement. 

Early PHP2Shell Attacks Emerging 

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and its EU and Australian counterparts urged PHP users to apply the fixes. “Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organizations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the NCSC said. Japan’s national cyber-security office and EU officials issued similar warnings. 

“PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful lot of software that doesn’t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,” said security firm Huntress. 

Affected versions remain unclear, though CERT-EU said CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 could reach back to PHP 5, launched in 2004. The update covers only the latest versions; users on PHP 8.1 or older should upgrade. Built for web development, PHP runs server-side on a large share, though not all, of the internet. 

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Ahold Delhaize cyberattack took brand sites offline in Europe and the US. Albert Heijn outage ends as the app returns; no data theft found yet.

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The post Ahold Delhaize Cyberattack Knocks Brand Websites and Apps Offline in US and Europe appeared first on Daily CyberSecurity.

Two critical Check Point VPN flaws score 9.8 and could enable remote code execution. Patch now and restrict VPN access before exploitation begins.

The Dutch NCSC warns that two critical vulnerabilities in Check Point VPN products, both rated CVSS score of 9.8, could soon be actively exploited. If you use Check Point VPN, you should patch it immediately.

CVE‑2026‑85102 resides in the VPN negotiation process and lets an unauthenticated attacker bypass security checks and run their own code on the gateway. CVE‑2026‑85103 is a heap overflow in the certificate ASN.1 decoder that also leads to remote code execution on Security Gateways and Security Management Servers.

Both vulnerabilities can be triggered by external attackers, and while no public proof‑of‑concept has surfaced yet, the NCSC explicitly rates the likelihood of exploitation and the potential damage as high.

“There are 2 critical vulnerabilities in Check Point VPN products with the attributes CVE-2026-85102 and CVE-2026-85103. These are 2 serious vulnerabilities with a CVSS score of 9.8.” reads the alert. “The NCSC assesses the likelihood of exploitation and potential damage as high and expects that attempts at exploitation will occur soon; therefore, the advice is to install the updates as soon as possible.”

An attacker can take over the system, read or change confidential data, and disrupt operations. In practice, that means your VPN appliance stops being a secure entry point and starts being a beachhead inside your network.

Check Point addressed the flaws on September 9 with the release of the advisories sk1000117 and sk1000118. The affected releases span R81.20, R82, R82.10, R81.10.x and R82.00.x, plus end‑of‑support versions from R80 through R81.10. R82.20 is not affected.

For supported versions, Check Point provides fixes through LivePatch Take 24 or specific Jumbo Hotfix updates, depending on the version you use.

If you use LivePatch with R81.20, R82 or R82.10, your system may already be protected without a reboot. However, you should check your setup to make sure. LivePatch does not cover every version or configuration, so don’t assume you are protected.

The NCSC’s advice is straightforward: install the updates as soon as possible. For organizations using Site‑to‑Site VPN, it also recommends tightening the ruleset: disable implied rules and restrict VPN access to specific, trusted IP addresses instead of leaving it wide open. If you’re not sure whether you’re running a vulnerable version, talk to your IT provider now, not after the first IOC shows up in your logs.

“The NCSC advises installing these updates as soon as possible. For organizations using Site-to-Site VPN, it is recommended to adjust certain VPN rules, such as disabling implied rules and restricting VPN access to specific IP addresses.” concludes the alert. “Contact your IT service provider if you are unsure whether you are using a vulnerable version. If necessary, ask for assistance in implementing the recommended measures.”

This isn’t a “schedule a change window next month” situation. It’s a “verify, patch, restrict, and move on before someone else decides your VPN is their new favorite initial access broker” kind of week.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Check Point)

What Happened

HMRC Issues Warning to TikTok Users

• On 4 June 2026, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) uncovered a suspected £153 million tax fraud scam involving TikTok.
• The scheme allegedly involved individuals posting advertisements on the TikTok, enticing users to hand over sensitive tax information, including business VAT registration details or personal self-assessment credentials for a financial reward.
• Using the stolen tax details, the fraudsters could file bogus repayment requests with HMRC.
• The warning comes after two Romanian men, aged 22 and 25, were apprehended by HMRC officers in east London on 23 April 2026 in connection with the alleged fraud.

Lloyds Bank found Two Thirds of Fraud Cases Started on Meta 

• On 6 June 2026, Liz Ziegler, the Lloyds fraud prevention director disclosed that 68% of fraud reports from their customers started on a Meta platform, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
• The average claim value submitted to Lloyds Bank is now above £500, an increase of about £100 from last year. Plus, victims were sending up to £66 million a year to fraudsters after falling victim to a scam advert via Meta, up from £27 million in 2023.
• The most common scams involve fake tickets for concerts, festivals and sporting events. Meta’s Facebook Marketplace is also plagued by fake adverts for cars, bikes, campervans and mobility vehicles.
• Other categories of fraud on Meta platforms, collected by Lloyds between March 2025 and 2026, include: wedding photobooths, tattoo deposits, vapes, wigs, Moncler jackets, football shirts, Dyson products and Amazon Alexas. Fraudulent transactions for deposits for flats, mobile phones, household furniture and gym equipment have also been observed.

UK Finance Recorded £221.5m Lost to Investment Scams

• In June 2026, UK Finance's Annual Fraud Report recorded the highest loss total ever recorded and the highest total number of cases ever reported at 14,893, which was 26% higher than 2025.
• Up to £221.5m was lost to scams in which victims were persuaded to transfer funds to a fake investment or fictitious fund. This figure also marked a 40% rise more than 2025.
• The primary observed tactics involved in investment scams include traditional cold calling to pressurise victims into acting quickly to claim an opportunity before it expires, as well as adverts on social media offering unrealistic rates of returns on investments, and hand-delivered letters.
• The types of investments fraudsters used as bait in 2026 involved gold, property, carbon credits, cryptocurrencies, land banks, and wine.

Fraudsters arrested in Nigeria following NCA intelligence sharing

• In February 2026, the National Crime Agency (NCA) announced that seven men were arrested in Nigeria after intelligence identified an online investment scam compound targeting UK victims. These arrests were the result of co-operation between the National Crime Agency, Meta and the Nigerian Police.
• Using hundreds of fake Facebook accounts accounts to impersonate cryptocurrency traders, the Nigeria-based scammers targeted people who used legitimate investment platforms.
• The scam compound was also allegedly recruiting and training young people in targeting victims for future investment frauds and phishing attacks. A total of 26 phones, 42 sim cards and a laptop were seized on 13 January.

Analyst Comment 

H1 2026 reinforces the transition from email-centric fraud campaigns to social-media-powered fraud operations, with platforms increasingly serving as the primary source of victims for organised cybercriminal groups. Fraudsters are also adapting scams to the culture and user behaviour of individual platforms, such as generate short promotional videos on TikTok or listing fake items for sale on Facebook Marketplace. Rather than deploying identical scams everywhere, criminals tailor campaigns to the platform's intended purpose. Recommendation algorithms and advertising ecosystems provide fraudsters with scalable victim acquisition channels that were previously unavailable through traditional phishing campaigns.

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) has also meant it is much easier for cybercriminals to carry out scams on a much larger scale than they were previously able to. Autonomous systems can enable them to send out messages at scale and contact users by telephone at scale. Plus the scam attempts are also more convincing as they can mimic voices and appearance of celebrities or even a target’s friends and family.

The scale of fraudulent activities across social media is so large, it requires vast resources and expertise to monitor, detect, and prevent. At the same time, the response from HMRC, banks, social media companies, the NCA, and international law enforcement suggests increasing recognition that combating social media fraud requires coordinated action.

The volume of fake accounts on social media used for scams does also validate the calls for increased verification and security checks on such platforms. The UK Government's proposal to introduce a national digital ID system, however, was met with fierce opposition. Up to 2.9 million people signed a UK parliament petition to show their disagreement with such a system.

Defensive Takeaways 

• Reduce Public Exposure: Fraudsters increasingly use information shared on social media to personalise scams and identify potential victims. Consider making profiles private or limiting visibility to trusted contacts and if you no longer actively use a social media platform, consider deleting the account entirely.
• Be on Guard for Scams: Sponsored advertisements should not automatically be considered legitimate. Refuse any financial rewards in exchange for your login credentials. Be cautious of investment opportunities promoted solely through social media. Assume Facebook Marketplace listings can be fraudulent.
• Report Suspicious Activity: Reporting scams helps remove fraudulent content and supports law enforcement investigations. Useful UK reporting channels include Report Fraud and the UK NCSC's Suspicious Email Reporting Service report@phishing.gov.uk.
• Seek Support after a Scam: Victims should not assume financial losses are unrecoverable. It can be possible to get funds returned if they contact their bank immediately, preserve screenshots and transactions records, and report the incident to Report Fraud. Further, if a victim is dissatisfied with how their bank handled their case, they can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Relevant Sources 

1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tiktok-hmrc-tax-fraud-scam-b2989914.html
2. https://www.thetimes.com/article/840020a8-1210-47c9-9262-e3139116b652?shareToken=771d08288cd2ac9d0ba13194f43d75a0
3. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2026/jun/15/investment-fraud-uk-more-than-220m-lost-last-year-scams-ai
4. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/system/files/2026-06/UK%20Finance%20Fraud%20Report%202026.pdf
5. https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/fraudsters-arrested-in-nigeria-following-nca-intelligence-sharing 

The UK Cyber Resilience Pledge gives organizations a 30/60/90-day checklist for NCSC alerts, supplier Cyber Essentials checks and board-level cyber governance.

The post UK Cyber Resilience Pledge Sets 90-Day Test for Security Leaders appeared first on TechRepublic.

The UK Cyber Security & Resilience Bill is progressing through Parliament Royal Assent expected later in 2026.

The UK's Cyber Security and Resilience Bill is working its way through Parliament, and if you haven't started paying serious attention yet, now is the time. Introduced to the House of Commons in November 2025, the Bill represents the most significant overhaul of UK cyber regulation since the NIS Regulations in 2018, and its implications for security practitioners are immediate and practical.

The post What the UK Cyber Security & Resilience Bill Means for Security Practitioners appeared first on Security Boulevard.