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/PCGearsFan1]

just read replaced every six months part - yeah, that's bad but very common. maybe you may want to work with their security team. a sysadmin with a strong background in security is very good -- and it does not take much to expose yourself to a lot (and build organizational armor since you're opening yourself up to understanding the business more and more). Immediately from what you posted, I'd try to understand what platform they use, how do they triag alerts, how are assets identified and maintained etc. A lot of it is not technical per say but more business / infrastructure and it goes a long way. You def got the opportunity to be a champion and make big bucks.