A decade-old flaw in the language behind much of the web, found by AI and serious enough to take Wikipedia offline. Driving licenses sold for AED 10,000 to people who never sat for a test. A police sweep across 21 African countries that ended in more than 1,400 arrests. 

This weekly roundup covers stories where the weak point was not always a firewall, but the trust built into code libraries, license agreements, and the frameworks organizations use to measure their own security. 

Here are the stories that shaped the week. 

The Cyber Express Weekly Roundup 

PHP2Shell Flaws Knock Wikipedia and Government Sites Offline 

Two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the scripting language that powers a large share of the web, have triggered urgent patching warnings from agencies around the world. Dubbed PHP2Shell and tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, the flaws have already been linked to outages at Wikipedia and a number of government websites. Read more… 

INTERPOL’s Operation Serengeti III Nets 1,462 Arrests Across Africa 

An INTERPOL-coordinated crackdown spanning 21 countries has ended in 1,462 arrests. Operation Serengeti III ran from June to August 2026 and targeted fraud, ransomware, business email compromise and online scams. Investigators disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than USD 105 million. The operation also identified nearly 66,000 victims, linked to combined losses of more than USD 385 million. Read more… 

ASD Essentials Replaces the Essential Eight 

The Australian Signals Directorate has launched ASD Essentials, a broader successor to the Essential Eight, the security baseline Australian organizations have long been measured against. Where the Essential Eight centered on a fixed set of mitigation strategies, the new framework extends its scope to enterprise IT, operational technology and cloud environments. Read more… 

Dubai Police Bust AED 10,000 Fake Driving License Scheme 

Dubai Police have arrested an eight-member gang that sold driving licenses for AED 10,000 each. Customers received licenses issued in a neighboring country without ever travelling there, taking a lesson or sitting a test. The gang then helped buyers convert those licenses into UAE licenses by exploiting legitimate license exchange agreements between the two countries. Read more… 

Fintechs Urged to Treat Software Supply Chain Security as Enterprise Risk 

Fintech firms vet their commercial vendors closely, but the open-source libraries, container images and third-party components inside their systems often arrive with far less scrutiny. That mismatch leaves a blind spot in how financial technology companies manage risk. Vijendra Katiyar of CleanStart points to examples such as a widely used Redis image that carried 185 known CVEs, and the Shai-Hulud worm, which spread through malicious npm packages. Read more… 

Conclusion 

Taken together, this week’s stories show how much of today’s risk comes from what organizations already trust: decade-old code, inherited software components, official exchange agreements and security checklists that measure effort rather than results. Follow The Cyber Express for next week’s weekly cybersecurity roundup and ongoing coverage of these stories. 

Verify you are human

Checking your browser before accessing this site.

Click to verify →

Then you will be redirected to the requested content.
Ray ID: 8f3a2c1b9d4e5f6a · Performance & security by Cloudflare

site-verification-ok

Verify you are human

Checking your browser before accessing this site.

Click to verify →

Then you will be redirected to the requested content.
Ray ID: 8f3a2c1b9d4e5f6a · Performance & security by Cloudflare

site-verification-ok

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. 

Verify you are human

Checking your browser before accessing this site.

Click to verify →

Then you will be redirected to the requested content.
Ray ID: 8f3a2c1b9d4e5f6a · Performance & security by Cloudflare

site-verification-ok