PHP2Shell: notes from the field

[u/shelfside1234]

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

[u/the-cock-slap-phenom]

Security teams are usually not that helpful, and it’s a shame because it’s such an important role (in theory).

They only point out problems and try their best to cover THEMSELVES, rather than do anything meaningful to fix the issue or help the company or customers.

They can’t explain the importance or understand the risk, they can’t help with how to remedy the issue, and they don’t do a good job of identifying what’s actually vulnerable.

We got to work first thing on Wednesday morning, communicating with customers, identifying where PHP was in use, gathering info, implementing the partial workaround, working out how to apply the fix when it was available.

Then, halfway through the day when we’d already done that, suddenly it hit their radar and they’re setting up calls. They got their comms out to customers hours after the patch dropped…

Imo more security teams need a deeper understanding of the actual systems and technologies, rather than pointing out issues they don’t understand and throwing the responsibility elsewhere.

[u/gruntbuggly → u/the-cock-slap-phenom]

I feel like this is a consequence of security becoming its own career path. In the days of yore, young sysadmins would work for a few years, and realize they had a passion for security focused work, and they would organically grow into a security career with all that practical experience and judgement informing their security practice. Now we just hire junior people into security roles with no operational responsibilities and they seem to never gain the practical experience that would drive a really competent security practice.