CVE-2026-119977 is a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability affecting WordPress versions 4.7 through 7.1.3. It stems from predictable, web-accessible staging directories used during core updates.
Unauthenticated attackers could exploit a race condition to execute malicious code on the server while an update is in progress, potentially compromising the website. WordPress addressed the flaw in version 7.1.4.
Threat actors began scanning for CVE-2026-119977 shortly after WordPress released the security update. Wordfence recorded more than 18,500 requests targeting vulnerable staging installer paths within the first 21 hours. However, these figures document exploitation attempts, not confirmed successful compromises.
“Wordfence telemetry shows that threat actors are already actively attempting to exploit the vulnerability. The first match for our new firewall rule arrived nine minutes after deployment. During the first 21 hours, we recorded more than 18,500 requests targeting staged setup-config.php installer paths.” reads the report published by Wordfence.
“Two of the largest sources repeatedly polled small groups of sites for roughly 14.5 hours, behavior consistent with trying to catch the brief upgrade window. Other sources tested many staging-directory and version-name variations.”
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has included a WordPress Core vulnerability in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog due to evidence of active exploitation. This vulnerability, identified as CVE-2026-119977, allows unauthenticated attackers to execute server-side code during a specific software upgrade window. CISA added this vulnerability to the catalog on November 3, 2026, […]
A phishing campaign impersonating OpenAI is using disposable WordPress websites and live attacker oversight to steal payment card details and potentially capture one-time passwords. Fraudulent ChatGPT Plus billing emails warn that subscription payments have failed, directing recipients to counterfeit checkout pages where operators control the victim’s next step. The operation combines infrastructure churn with interactive […]
UPD 23.10.2026: added Kaspersky SIEM rules and events for developing custom detection rules or conducting threat hunting.
UPD 22.10.2026: added a description of how the Kaspersky Managed Detection and Response service detects the described malicious activity.
UPD 22.10.2026: added a description of how Kaspersky Vulnerability Management detects vulnerable versions of PHP.
Vulnerability overview
On October 20, 2026, the PHP security team published a preliminary notice regarding an upcoming emergency release that addresses two critical vulnerabilities (both rated 9.2 on the CVSS scale). The patches were released on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 14:00 UTC.
The release was expedited after information about the vulnerabilities was leaked to the public before the scheduled embargo was lifted. In a post on Hacker News, a user reported two RCE vulnerabilities in PHP, allegedly affecting all versions starting with PHP 5.4.0.
The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. Shortly after the post appeared, researchers confirmed the existence of the vulnerabilities. Along with the leak of details, an exploit unofficially named PHP2Shell appeared online. In the leaked demo video, the exploit is shown in action on web servers running WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, Magento, Joomla, Laravel, Symfony, Drupal, and WHMCS — platforms that power many modern websites. The authenticity of the demonstration and the exact behavior of the exploit had not been independently verified at the time of publication.
According to the researcher who published the PoC, the vulnerabilities are related to the handling of the multipart/form-data MIME type in conjunction with the session upload progress mechanism (session.upload_progress) in the PHP core and fall under the categories of use-after-free and memory corruption. This means that the flaws cannot be fixed via application code, and the only fix is to update PHP on the server. The attack requires no authentication: an attacker with network access to a PHP application can execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the PHP process without needing to authenticate. Security advisories issued by the PHP team on October 21 confirm this information.
The vulnerabilities affect PHP versions 5, 7, and 8. As of this publication, branches 8.2 through 8.5 are supported. Older branches, including PHP 8.1, 8.0, 7.x, and 5.x, have reached the end of their lifecycle; however, due to the critical severity of the vulnerabilities, backported patches have also been released for versions 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1.
Sansec experts estimate that widespread exploitation could begin within 15 minutes of the update’s release. We strongly recommend that administrators responsible for publicly accessible PHP web servers take the following steps before the patch is available:
Take an inventory of all PHP-based systems in your infrastructure (such as web servers, control panels, and third-party software).
Disable upload-progress: set session.upload_progress.enabled = Off using the php_admin_flag in PHP-FPM pools.
Block multipart requests on nginx and Apache servers.
Consider temporarily isolating PHP applications that connect to the Internet until fixes are released.
Be ready to install the patch immediately upon its release.
Plan to migrate servers running unsupported versions (8.1 and earlier) to the latest PHP branch.
Detection by Kaspersky solutions
Kaspersky solutions detect the described malicious activity at various stages of the attack. Possible detection scenarios are listed below.
When an attempt is made to exploit these RCE vulnerabilities, Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response promptly alerts the user to suspicious actions performed in the context of a web server, on both Linux and Windows machines. This activity is detected by the following rules:
Spawning of suspicious processes by the web server;
Creation of suspicious executable files in the web application directory;
Creation of suspicious scripts in the web application directory;
Creation of files with uncommon extensions in the web application directory;
Execution of reconnaissance commands by the web server process;
Execution of persistence commands by the web server process;
Delivery and launch of web shells on the web server.
Moreover, MDR detects other malicious activity not directly related to remote code execution.
To protect companies that use our Kaspersky SIEM system, the product repository includes rules that help detect the following malicious activity.
Execution of suspicious executable files by web server processes on Windows and Linux machines:
R300_04_Windows shell started by a web application
R152_08_A running Linux shell process has a suspicious parent process
Execution of reconnaissance commands by the web server process:
R286_05_Possible web-shell (Linux)
We also recommend monitoring the creation of scripts or executable files in the web server directory when developing your own detection rules or conducting threat hunting:
((DeviceEventClassID = '4663' AND DeviceCustomString1 ilike 'WriteData') OR DeviceEventClassID = '11')
AND match(FileName,'(?i).*\.(php|asp|aspx|ashx|jsp|js|jar|jse|dll|exe|bat|ps1|vbs|wsf|wsh|msi|msp|hta|cpl)$')
AND match(DestinationProcessName,'(?i).*(php-cgi|nginx|httpd|w3wp)\.exe')
Name = 'openat' AND has(SA.Nametype, 'CREATE')
AND
length(arrayFilter(x -> match(x, '(public_html|var/www|usr/local/apache2|usr/local/httpd|var/apache|srv/www|home/httpd/html|srv/http|usr/share/nginx/html|var/lib/pgsql/data|usr/local/mysql/data|var/lib/mysql|var/vsftpd|etc/bind|var/named)'), SA.FileName))>1
AND
length(arrayFilter(x -> match(x, '\.(aspx|asp|asmx|asax|ashx|jspx|jsp|js|phpt|php|phtml|pht|cfm|shtml|htaccess|fcgi|cgi|pl|py|sh)'), SA.FileName))>1
Expect to see quite a few websites serving error pages today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers. Experts say there are working exploits for the flaws, and that these critical bugs are already being exploited in the wild.
Image: Shutterstock.com, Sashkin.
The flaws at issue are present in PHP, the programming language that powers sites running on a large number of web publishing systems, including Drupal, Magento, Joomla and WordPress. Earlier today, PHP released an emergency security update to fix two critical bugs that can allow an attacker to execute code of their choosing on a vulnerable server.
Reutersreports that government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline today after the PHP vulnerabilities were disclosed. Cloudflare said it has already detected some exploitation of the flaw, and that at 3:02 am (UTC) it implemented web application firewall rules to protect websites from attack traffic seeking to exploit the bugs, which could cause a denial of service condition, remote code execution, and data exposure.
OpenAI, which was involved in the vulnerability research and outreach, said “given the severity of these flaws and PHP’s widespread use, we consider this one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.”
Censys, a company that tracks the technology used by Internet hosts, said a recent scan identified approximately 2.58 million Internet facing hosts and 54.9 million web properties running PHP.
Security experts at Wiz said every PHP version released in the last decade is affected by at least one of these vulnerabilities [full disclosure: Wiz is an advertiser on this blog].
“These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history,” reads a blog post published today by a team of researchers at Wiz, which was one of several organizations credited with discovering the vulnerabilities. “The underlying flaws had been present for decades, but demonstrating their exploitability required an exceptionally complex chain of steps, at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve. Frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.”
The Wiz researchers say it is likely the PHP vulnerabilities will be mass-exploited to install web-based backdoors or “web shells,” which give attackers a web-based panel that allows them to remotely control infected sites. Wiz said that prior to the PHP bugs being publicly disclosed, the company worked with the PHP team, Calif and OpenAI to measure the size of the problem and coordinate patch verification and disclosure.
The PHP zero-day vulnerabilities are being tracked by their CVE numbers, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, and they affect all web servers running PHP 5.4 or later. The bugs are fixed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.
According to Wiz, PHP is so deeply embedded in many web applications that we are likely to see organizations struggling to patch these vulnerabilities for some time to come, comparing this PHP vulnerability pair with the Log4Shell weakness that emerged in 2021 — a widespread, severe-as-it-gets security flaw in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework.
“A vulnerability in core PHP reaches far beyond a single application,” the Wiz researchers wrote. “PHP runs across clouds, hosting providers, content-delivery networks and millions of independently managed servers. Reducing exposure before the technical details became public required coordinated work across that entire ecosystem.”
The SANS Internet Storm Center is keeping an eye on major software platforms that are shipping updates to deal with these PHP flaws. For example, Ubuntu just released updated PHP packages. For a technical deep-dive on these vulnerabilities that tells the timeline of the discovery of these bugs in a comic book style, check out this post from Calif, another technology company credited with finding the PHP flaws.
A snapshot of php2shell.censys.com, the website Censys set up to track the PHP vulnerabilities.
This is a fast-moving story. Updates will be noted here with timestamps.
Update, 2:30 pm ET: Add figures from Censys and a link to Calif’s writeup.
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Hackers can compromise vulnerable WordPress websites without stealing passwords by chaining two security flaws in the platform’s core. Disclosed in July 2026, the chain involves CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137. Unlike attacks dependent on vulnerable extensions, WP2Shell affects default WordPress installations without requiring a third-party plugin. Public exploit code and observed exploitation have made unpatched deployments an […]
Attackers are actively targeting a critical vulnerability in the Bricksforge WordPress plugin. This flaw allows unauthenticated users to upload malicious files and execute arbitrary PHP code. It is tracked as CVE-2026-85097 and has a CVSS score of 10.0, affecting versions up to 3.1.8.9. Administrators are advised to upgrade to version 3.1.8.10 or later. Patchstack disclosed […]
The project recommends immediate updates, with fixes also available for older affected branches. Only the latest WordPress version remains actively supported.
The release documentation lists seven security issues, although its introductory sentence describes “one security fix.” It provides no CVE identifiers, severity scores, or confirmed exploitation details. Consequently, the headline’s critical wording should not be interpreted as an official severity classification for every vulnerability.
One vulnerability involves stored cross-site scripting on the Comments administration page. Pending comments provide the attack surface, potentially exposing administrators when they review submitted content.
Thomas Chauchefoin of Trail of Bits reported this issue. The disclosure does not describe the malicious payload or precise conditions required for successful exploitation.
A separate cross-site scripting weakness affects Imgur embeds. WordPress credits Zhengyu Liu, Jingcheng Yang, and Gavin Zhong with reporting it.
These two findings concern different content pathways: comment moderation and embedded media. Both make the update relevant to sites that process user content or display externally sourced material.
WordPress Vulnerabilities
Anthropic reported a second-order SQL injection vulnerability in WordPress WXR export. The release identifies the export component but does not explain the injection sequence, required permissions, or database impact.
Administrators should therefore avoid assuming that the issue enables unrestricted database access or that every export operation is exploitable. Another vulnerability allows unauthenticated disclosure of comments associated with private and unpublished posts.
Reported by Ananda Dhakal of Patchstack, this issue affects information expected to remain outside public access. The announcement identifies comments as the exposed data it does not claim that attackers can retrieve complete private posts.
Anthropic also reported a weakness that lets users with the Author role make posts sticky. This represents an authorization problem involving a publishing capability.
Separately, Alex Concha of the WordPress security team reported forgeable parameters passed to the {status}_{type} hook that can produce action name collisions. The announcement leaves the broader exploitation consequences unspecified.
A denial-of-service issue affects the WP_Http::make_absolute_url() method. Anthropic reported this finding as well, but WordPress provides no request pattern, resource-consumption measurements, or detailed attack prerequisites in the release notes.
Administrators can install WordPress 7.1.3 through Dashboard > Updates or obtain it from the official releases page. WordPress explicitly recommends updating sites immediately because this is a security release. Older affected branches also receive these fixes, but that doesn’t change the project’s stated support policy.
The revised files span administration JavaScript, export handling, REST posts, customization, HTTP processing, embeds, queries, and post operations. No packages were revised.
A credential-collection toolkit dubbed TIKTOUK that combines WordPress reconnaissance, exposed-file harvesting, plugin credential decryption, and JavaScript secret scanning. The toolkit consists of two Python scripts, wp2s_poll.py and wp2s_crack.py, alongside a stripped Go-based Linux crawler named jscrawl-amd64. All three components retrieve targets from a central HTTP hub, execute assigned collection tasks, and submit status reports and […]
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