PHP2Shell Security Flaws Now Successfully Exploited

Confirmed Exploitation in the Wild

The critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) have now been successfully exploited in the wild, just days after patches were released and initial exploitation attempts failed.

BleepingComputer reports: The malicious activity was caught by Adel Karimi, detection and response lead at Perplexity, whose honeypots recorded evidence of confirmed remote code execution against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26.

Technical Evidence

"This is now confirmed RCE with usable memory disclosure, not just a crash followed by a suspicious process. The response delivered an 800 KiB decoded cookie dump, and a function address derived from that dump using the public exploit's offsets appears in the subsequent execution payload," Karimi shared.

"The evidence demonstrates this chain on the intentionally favorable single-worker mod_php profile; it is not a measurement of exploit reliability on other worker counts, PHP builds, or applications," he added.

Independent Confirmation

Karimi's findings were also confirmed by Expel threat researcher Marcus Hutchins, who has been tracking a stream of alleged successful PHP2Shell exploitation reports.

"This is by far the highest quality confirmation of in-the-wild php2shell exploitation I've seen so far. Deep technical breakdown of a successful exploitation attempt against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26," Hutchins said.