> On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix.
This is incredibly damming of Chainguard. I struggle to see justification for this, even with the chaos approaching the coordinated release.
I dunno, the post is awfully critical of Chainguard for leaking a fixed binary 6 hours early, but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic (not to mention spawning millions of agents crawling the php codebase and trying to brute force a POC and probably using more energy than a lot of countries in the process).
Calif more than Chainguard, but still Chainguard too.
Calif was obviously twitching to claim credit for their findings, and what I find troubling is this eagerness was more important to them than giving users a chance to update their systems.
Even if they ended up waiting only a day post release I would still say it seems a bit too soon. Maybe a week after. Not everyone’s system have aggressive patching schedules and PHP is soo heavily used.
wow, okay. yes, that really does look like a "my first PoC" video made by an early teenager. hard to believe that this was produced by a company that wants to be taken seriously.
I wish people would name this idiotic company, I can't see Twitter here and all people are talking about is a childish video they made. I don't ever want to do business with said company, ever.
They're apparently not trustworthy, and behave as children.
>As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities.
Let's hope so. Shall we create a new norm? A 365 day timeout, for companies like Chainguard that deliberately break embargoes.
Very irresponsible behaviour in my opinion; and if it's a decision made unilaterally by their CEO, probably a breach of their SOC 2 certification. What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix, don't worry, we're making this free!"
Nah, Chainguard should be praised for this. It was a different company that leaked the POC early, and then PHP, Wiz, OpenAI, and Calif sat on their hands doing nothing while the vuln was being actively exploited in the wild. Chainguard did the right thing by getting the fix out as quick as possible to stop the bleeding (or gushing flow of blood, really) rather than sitting on it so they could make a coordinated marketing post, like the others did.
That's a reasonably take. Embargos only work until the information's leaked, and once that's happened, however it happened, the bad guys have the exploit information and the clock starts ticking.
Chainguard effectively held everyone hostage, and forced everyone hosting container images and wanting to be online, to trust their builds and then saying they did it for "free" to get free advertisement. Incredibly irresponsible behavior. They used this as a big fat advertisement board.
I kinda get Chainguard's position here. They were part of the embargo, saw exploits hitting in the wild already and decided to release rather than hold things back.
Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.
The person who wrote the widely-referred-to tweet last night (claiming to "have recreated & lab/field tested CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619") followed up a couple hours later and said that their POC had not been proven to work "in the wild"
"Cloudflare successfully deployed multiple mitigations for all its customers while the vulnerability was leaked before the official release date and we observed attack traffic targeting our customers."
If that's not an in-the-wild exploit, it literally couldn't have been further away than one or two more iterations.
It sounds like there was no "co-ordination" behind any of this co-ordinated disclosure. You'd have expected there to be an IRC channel, a mailing list, a Slack chat, or something for something of this scale.
Was there even an incident co-ordinator here? Was any of the parties talking to each other?
Many people actively following would have 403'ed multiparts so people seeing those blocked might have assumed it started being exploited early instead of probes / background noise.
if their comment in true (linked in sibling comments), then it's really not damning. typically an embargo is ended when someone leaks early or it's being exploited in the wild.
so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.
If they're gonna unilaterally release an exploit patch 6 hours before an agreed upon embargo for a CVSS 9.2 that affects like ~70% of the internet then they better have reams of evidence showing this was being exploited in a widespread manner and not just "we saw a dancing anime girl edit of a theoretical exploit on twitter, so we had to release it to the world"
And evidence they at least gave a heads up to everyone in on the embargo, eg "I have to release you all have 1 hour to get on board".
There is a MASSIVE difference between a small number of people exploiting in the wild, and a few hours after a release a bazillion script kiddies doing so. The move to release and break an embargo was childish, absurd, self-serving, and lacking in all common sense. Not to mention, breaking trust.
I agree with those in this thread who say, never going to do business with them. Ever.
As a customer, I'd immediately assume no one in the security community would trust them again, and seek someone else to give my money to. Why pay a) an untrustworthy company who b) now is not trusted by anyone and c) won't ever be able to early release again anyhow? And if anything, are left out of important conversations.
Way to burn bridges. You only get to be an asshat once.
Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release
2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral
3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
[Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead
4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early
5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown
Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.
> 3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.
Not really sure if 3 is correct. Might have been Calif leaks the video -> it goes viral -> people make PoCs based on the video -> Chainguard releases the binary because there seem to be credible PoCs out there (that are not just the Shigure Ui video).
I can empathize with them, this is actually quite difficult when you're an open source project.
You have your source code public, so you can't commit/push because then you've leaked info.
Your build pipeline is also likely public, so you can't just build from another source code... source.
You can create a private repo, but now you also need to build a private build system.
You don't get the same generous build resources for private repos, so you either:
a) simplify the build to just the essentials
b) pay
Unless you have significant funding, you'll probably go for a).
Now you have to maintain two systems, also with some differences between them.
Plus you need a way to get the build artifacts from the private system to the public one, typically at a fixed point in time.
Any failure/delay (e.g. less powerful build on private repo, errors because you exercise it rarely) causes people to get upset that you didn't respect the announced time.
Maybe you're also using things like image attestation, another can of worms.
Those are all challenges that surely need to be overcome!
But they had _two months_ to figure out how to overcome them. For them to not have figured out a solution and have pre-built images ready to push as soon as the embargo lifted is ridiculous.
Making a cloud CI/build/release system whose behavior can't be reproduced locally requires some kind of brain damage. I can't believe people tolerate this.
I'd say that for someone like PHP, in this era of AI-driven vulnerability/patch race, having a private CI/CD pipeline is a necessity.
PHP is written in C, I'd be surprised if similar problems didn't lurk in other places.
Maybe they will construct the private pipeline after this crisis. Millions of websites are probably now waiting for all the downstream Docker images to be built and pushed.
I find it incredibly naive that they’d hope it would not leak after weeks/months of embargo.
Being given advance notice of an upcoming security fix is an immense privilege, organisations should turn around quickly when given such information, they shouldn’t be given more than a couple of days to update IMHO, it’s not like the rest of the world can wait.
Keep in mind that some of the organizations are presumably patching ancient versions of PHP like 5.6. I am sure this is a process which takes considerable time, especially as upstream PHP has washed their hands of such old versions and the downstreams are effectively on their own.
(It is often much cheaper for an enterprise to just get a long term support contract than to properly upgrade to a modern PHP stack.)
The PHP Foundation should manage it, the Docker ""Official" Images" approach clearly just doesn't work properly for responding to vulnerability patches.
> As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video.
This is the most surprising part to me. It sounds like Calif saw the leaks, interpreted that as embargo being broken, and then raced to publish their [anime dancing] marketing video? I'd have expected much better.
This reads like some guy tripped and fell on top of his mouse and in so doing, accidentally turned on screen recording, performed the exploit a few times, got the anime girl asset and soundtrack, dropped all of them into Premiere, added the weird effects, rendered the video, and published the video to Twitter. "Ow. What did I fall on? Oh noooo, I broke the embargo!"
> The PHP security team closely monitored and inspected appearing PoCs after the leak but did not identify any functional exploits at the time of release/public disclosure
Okay, but how close did they get? Were they close enough that a determined actor could've (perhaps using an LLM) managed to get to a functioning exploit?
I know of a php exploited about 4 hours before their release time 1400 UTC, using the session bug in an exploit that was passed around. I'm really not very much in the loop about cyber security things. What were they monitoring?!
> The PHP security team, operating on consensus, struggled to choose between these and feared the repercussions of shipping the wrong choice.
This is the real story. You ship one of them (the breaking change) with —fuck-my-shit-up or something as a compile time option to switch to the other fix.
>On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is 9.2). No technical details leaked.
This was partly me. I take responsibility for posting it on HN. I am truly sorry for the disruption this has likely caused.
My contact had informed me there was no embargo, and told me her contact had told her the same. It transpired this morning that was a lie.
>On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
On the plus side, at least I'm not Chainguard. Yikes.
>Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix.
>This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
Good. Coordinated disclosure meant that people couldn't protect themselves. That's not a good thing. It meant sites were forced to shut down instead of simply updating.
That is incredibly damaging to the trust that coordinated vulnerability disclosure depends upon. The obvious consequence is that Chainguard should never again receive embargoed fixes in advance. You don’t get invited back into the room after demonstrating that you can’t be trusted with the information.
They didn’t get to unilaterally decide that the embargo was inconvenient and publish early.
This is incredibly damming of Chainguard. I struggle to see justification for this, even with the chaos approaching the coordinated release.
Calif more than Chainguard, but still Chainguard too.
Calif was obviously twitching to claim credit for their findings, and what I find troubling is this eagerness was more important to them than giving users a chance to update their systems.
Even if they ended up waiting only a day post release I would still say it seems a bit too soon. Maybe a week after. Not everyone’s system have aggressive patching schedules and PHP is soo heavily used.
They took it down but someone added the anime stuff and reposted it. Totally irresponsible.
Song is Petite Meller - High Forever (Marlon Hoffstadt Remix). Which is annoyingly catchy
thanks.
This industry is full of immature children who cannot keep their mouths shut for 24 hours. They have no clue what massive coordination this requires.
They're apparently not trustworthy, and behave as children.
>As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities.
You can see the same demo video on their site: https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
In their place I would worry that this was the last time anyone shared an embargoed build with them.
Very irresponsible behaviour in my opinion; and if it's a decision made unilaterally by their CEO, probably a breach of their SOC 2 certification. What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix, don't worry, we're making this free!"
That can be for marketing purposes or by mistake. Not sure how to deal with that.
Dont trust us with information lol.
Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.
[0] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263
[1] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137
"Cloudflare successfully deployed multiple mitigations for all its customers while the vulnerability was leaked before the official release date and we observed attack traffic targeting our customers."
If that's not an in-the-wild exploit, it literally couldn't have been further away than one or two more iterations.
From Cloudflare’s perspective, there is no downside to saying what they observed, and deploying defenses.
We may never know if this was actually being successfully exploited prior to patch availability.
Was there even an incident co-ordinator here? Was any of the parties talking to each other?
so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.
There is a MASSIVE difference between a small number of people exploiting in the wild, and a few hours after a release a bazillion script kiddies doing so. The move to release and break an embargo was childish, absurd, self-serving, and lacking in all common sense. Not to mention, breaking trust.
I agree with those in this thread who say, never going to do business with them. Ever.
I highly doubt their paying customers feel the same way
I would let Chainguard deal with the patches post official release like all other unreliable parties.
As a customer, I'd immediately assume no one in the security community would trust them again, and seek someone else to give my money to. Why pay a) an untrustworthy company who b) now is not trusted by anyone and c) won't ever be able to early release again anyhow? And if anything, are left out of important conversations.
Way to burn bridges. You only get to be an asshat once.
Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735
1. There was a leak of the pre-announcement
2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral
3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
[Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead
4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early
5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown
Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.
I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.
Still not great though.
https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
You have your source code public, so you can't commit/push because then you've leaked info.
Your build pipeline is also likely public, so you can't just build from another source code... source.
You can create a private repo, but now you also need to build a private build system.
You don't get the same generous build resources for private repos, so you either:
a) simplify the build to just the essentials
b) pay
Unless you have significant funding, you'll probably go for a).
Now you have to maintain two systems, also with some differences between them.
Plus you need a way to get the build artifacts from the private system to the public one, typically at a fixed point in time.
Any failure/delay (e.g. less powerful build on private repo, errors because you exercise it rarely) causes people to get upset that you didn't respect the announced time.
Maybe you're also using things like image attestation, another can of worms.
But they had _two months_ to figure out how to overcome them. For them to not have figured out a solution and have pre-built images ready to push as soon as the embargo lifted is ridiculous.
PHP is written in C, I'd be surprised if similar problems didn't lurk in other places.
Maybe they will construct the private pipeline after this crisis. Millions of websites are probably now waiting for all the downstream Docker images to be built and pushed.
Being given advance notice of an upcoming security fix is an immense privilege, organisations should turn around quickly when given such information, they shouldn’t be given more than a couple of days to update IMHO, it’s not like the rest of the world can wait.
(It is often much cheaper for an enterprise to just get a long term support contract than to properly upgrade to a modern PHP stack.)
This is the most surprising part to me. It sounds like Calif saw the leaks, interpreted that as embargo being broken, and then raced to publish their [anime dancing] marketing video? I'd have expected much better.
This reads like some guy tripped and fell on top of his mouse and in so doing, accidentally turned on screen recording, performed the exploit a few times, got the anime girl asset and soundtrack, dropped all of them into Premiere, added the weird effects, rendered the video, and published the video to Twitter. "Ow. What did I fall on? Oh noooo, I broke the embargo!"
Heck of a mistake.
> Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images ...
Won't be the last time this happens. If there is no consequence of breaking the rules, people will keep doing that.
It sounds cliche but yes, they should rewrite PHP in rust or other memory safe language.
Okay, but how close did they get? Were they close enough that a determined actor could've (perhaps using an LLM) managed to get to a functioning exploit?
This is the real story. You ship one of them (the breaking change) with —fuck-my-shit-up or something as a compile time option to switch to the other fix.
PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836
Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181175
Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172041
for legacy systems, how difficult would it be for an attacker assisted by "AI" to stage the conditions
on a scale of 1 (easiest) to 10 (hardest)
This was partly me. I take responsibility for posting it on HN. I am truly sorry for the disruption this has likely caused.
My contact had informed me there was no embargo, and told me her contact had told her the same. It transpired this morning that was a lie.
>On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
On the plus side, at least I'm not Chainguard. Yikes.
>This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
Good. Coordinated disclosure meant that people couldn't protect themselves. That's not a good thing. It meant sites were forced to shut down instead of simply updating.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735
They didn’t get to unilaterally decide that the embargo was inconvenient and publish early.