This New PHP Hack Nearly Shut The Internet Down...
Source: YouTube · SomeOrdinaryGamers · published Oct 21, 2026 · 20:36
[BLUF] A critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in PHP, powered by AI-assisted discovery, caused widespread internet outages including 4chan due to the rapid spread of unpatched exploits 2:15. The incident highlights how AI accelerates both the discovery of long-standing security flaws and their subsequent exploitation in the wild 8:40.
Key Takeaways:
• The vulnerability involves two CVEs (CVE-2024-109618 and CVE-2024-109619) allowing unauthenticated remote code execution via out-of-memory corruption or stale state issues 1:30.
• Security researchers at Califf, using OpenAI's "Patch the Planet" initiative, utilized LLMs to turn a 20-year-old theoretical memory limit bug into a practical exploit chain 4:30.
• The coordinated disclosure was compromised when exploit details leaked on social media two days early, forcing PHP to accelerate the release and causing many sites to go offline as protective measures 6:30.
• The speaker demonstrates a proof-of-concept exploit where triggering a memory limit error leaves orphaned state data in the server, which subsequent requests can leverage to execute arbitrary code 11:30.
• This incident underscores a new paradigm where human expertise guides AI to find vulnerabilities, but the same AI tools allow attackers to rapidly weaponize these findings before patches are universally applied 18:00.
Closing Statement:
The PHP incident serves as a stark warning that AI is fundamentally changing the speed and accessibility of cyberattacks, making rapid patching essential for all web infrastructure.
Sources:
- 1:30 Details on the specific CVEs and the nature of the remote code execution flaws.
- 4:30 Explanation of how OpenAI and Califf used LLMs to discover the vulnerability.
- 6:30 Discussion of the early leak of exploit details and the resulting emergency response.
- 11:30 Demonstration of the exploit mechanism involving memory exhaustion and state corruption.
- 18:00 Analysis of the role of human-guided AI in both finding and exploiting bugs.
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First 800 characters of the transcript
Hello guys and gals. Me Mudahar and ladies and gentlemen, do you guys know that the old 4chan is currently down? In fact, a lot of websites are actually going to be taken down just for a little bit because guess what happened like literally last night, last evening, uh, a nuclear bomb was about to go off on the internet. Now, there's something known as PHP. Now, PHP for anybody that doesn't know what it is, PHP is a generalurpose scripting language that is specially suited to web development. Now, you might be like, well, where is PHP, Muda? I would say that probably around a vast majority of the internet, over 70 to around 80% of the internet pretty much has PHP all spread around it. Okay, even if you don't know what this is, every time you go to the internet, you know, let's say you're o…