PHP2Shell and the PHP scare that nearly stopped the web
On Wednesday, a pair of long-dormant vulnerabilities in PHP sparked an emergency scramble across the internet. The bugs—dubbed PHP2Shell and assigned CVE‑2026‑109618 and CVE‑2026‑109619—allow unauthenticated remote code execution on affected systems. Once researchers demonstrated exploitability, vendors and web hosts rushed to apply patches released by the PHP Foundation, while companies and governments warned users and some organizations temporarily took services offline to protect themselves. What happened Security researchers at Calif…
