Wiz says AI helped it chain decade-old flaws into unauthenticated RCE in core PHP

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Wiz says AI helped it chain decade-old flaws into unauthenticated RCE in core PHP

Wiz Research found unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP core itself, independent of any application, and nearly every PHP version since 5.4 is affected.
The bugs come from mishandling fatal errors such as out-of-memory conditions, which leave corrupted state that a later request or worker can reuse.
Wiz says frontier AI models including Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-5.6 Sol cut the work of chaining the flaws into working exploits to hours.
Wiz reported the bugs to the PHP security team on August 24, 2026, and PHP released patches on October 21, 2026.
The issues fall under two CVEs, with the highest severity reaching CVSS 9.2, and Wiz demonstrated pre-authentication RCE against WordPress and Drupal.

Hacker News opinions

Wondering if PHP was part of Project Glasswing? A decade-old bug just sitting there is scary. Makes me wonder what else is lurking.

Lots of stuff runs on PHP, most message boards too. It was huge before the dynamic web took off.

No humans, just AI. But grinding through abandoned code is exactly what AI is good at since it never sleeps. Someone also said both bugs were reported before AI, so how did those reports slip through without a fix?

Wiz is pushing its own product here. Gemini 4 Argon got called invaluable, and they had early access. Wouldn't it have been smarter to wait a few minutes after the fix shipped?

The flaw was in at least 20-year-old code and no compute costs are disclosed. Still a big deal though, since a compromised WordPress site is an easy foot in the door to internal networks.

Two months between report and disclosure is way too long. I bet a lot of people got looped in. When I was at AWS for Spectre and Meltdown, about 30 people knew from one company alone, and this one hits anyone running PHP. All it takes is one person wanting internet fame to leak it.

Calif started disclosure on August 11 and Wiz on August 24. Nobody's clear on how they all interacted, and the responsible part looks shaky after a leak.

Wiz covered remote process-memory disclosure, OPcache type confusion, and a fatal-error backtrace UAF. Calif hit the Zend HashTable OOM bug. Both found the upload progress unserializer UAF.

The backport seems to disable session upload entirely in old versions instead of really fixing the bug, so old branches aren't patched the same way as new ones.