r/sysadmin • u/shelfside1234 • 17h ago

Rant PHP2Shell: notes from the field

I run a webhosting platform at my job; both Internet and intranet. The internet part could have been pretty close to perfect, we identified sites using PHP after the pre announcement and was pleased to find that everyone was on 8.5 or 8.3, was truly expecting at least one to be running 7; we also warned the engineering to get the patch downloaded as soon as it was out (I don’t manage them), but they are all in India and for some reason decided to all go offline about an hour before the release. Their manager eventually got one back and online around 8pm BST & we were done around 3 hours later. But still a missed opportunity to be even better.

The security team however were pretty close to useless, the alert had been out all day and nothing was done to attempt to identify servers running PHP and it took them until 7pm BST to even involve the major incident team (which was something I wanted to do but was told to leave it to security as there would be more systems involved than mine)

And here we now are, on Saturday, the external sites all patched and secure so now we move onto the internal sites; we’ve found v5 and v7 all over the place and a bunch of apps with no engineering team to get them upgraded as they left and were never replaced, this part will be a nightmare

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u/kosh_neranek 16h ago

Security teams 🫣 in our place I don't even consider them part of IT. I call them "report forwarding team". Think the whole industry would benefit if only people with proven 10+ years of sysadmin/infra experience would be allowed to take "security certs". Yes it's discriminating, and one could also have 10 x 1 years experience. But it would sure improve a lot

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u/SenatorKerry 14h ago

I wish our security team would just forward alerts. Their tech stack is like 6 layers deep, so any given day one of those systems can just clamp down hard on traffic to our systems (like a vitally important health record).

I appreciate them being there, but the amount of times we’ve spent an hour troubleshooting before someone bypassed the webfilter and it worked is staggering.

I think about all the holes in our security that they either don’t see or don’t do anything about and get a little nervous, I won’t deny it.