The entire premise of Bimi is just EV certs all over again, wrapped up in an email security blanket. Naturally it starts with a cartel of limited approved CAs.
There is a lot of cynicism in this thread but the fact this is still open and hour later ends the narrative in my view. There are not "thousands of swarms of agents autonomously compromising every site for its authors" or any the other x / LinkedIn dribble ive been reading.
right: either it’s so hard to exploit that $1,000 isn’t enough to risk “giving away” your exploit chain or actual exploitation of this bug is impractical, either way the CVEpocalypse is overblown
OP just posted that there's a solve. And from a previous update thread apparently their first config was not actually exploitable? So ... seems like it is happening. Maybe not instantly, at least not if the site just remains down for hours because it's functionally DoSed, but it still is apparently exploitable.
yeah between updating the challenge and it getting solved only like a bit over 2 hours passed and that is with the server probably still being super overloaded
> Yes! Was serving pure html through PHP before 13:00-ish UTC when I added that page
Yeah, AI seems like a good shift in "narrative making." It's easy to ask AI "give me an efficient way to "confirm or deny this narrative" and have something like this go viral. This is good because it makes narratives more truthful
Because only a fraction of people would double check (AI or otherwise), AI making it easier to flood the zone with fine tuned spam actuallu has the opposite effect. We're seeing this at play at a large scale anywhere an election is happening right now. The narratives are even less truthful than before.
What point is an anonymous online post proving? Can anyone verify that the private key actually exists? Or which version of PHP the site is running? Or if it is running PHP at all?
If someone was able to gain access to the server and there was no key, they would report it here with proof. If someone had a working PHP exploit and it didn't work on this server, they would be able to post it here with proof.
I just hacked the site and wasn't able to find any key. Do you believe me? Why not? I posted exactly as much proof as the person who posted the challenge.
Wow i don’t know… maybe modify the web page to have your username on it. No wow that is too hard for you leet haxers. Are you really this dumb you can’t figure out any of the hundreds of way to show proof?
I reconfigured nginx on one of my servers to log all attempted multipart POST requests. Been tailing the log, and while there is a trickle of entries, they all are for empty forms, none are php2shell specific.
Interestingly enough, virtually all of these come from the Google Cloud IP space. There was a single hit from China and two from Europe.
You can see the commenters arguing with me about ASLR in the old thread. Half the commenters here, including quite a few "thought leaders" (not gonna name names or ad hominems but everybody knows who they are), insist that there are ways to implement this exploit at scale without having to do rowhammer-style spam brute forcing. I am still waiting. There's a lot of FUD and hearsay in the tech circles grapevine but very little evidence of actual working exploits against a modern Linux server outside of "attempts".
Maybe link to the argument? I can only find two comments from you on that post and only one person replied. That one reply isn’t from a “thought leader” either.
> There is a lot of cynicism in this thread but the fact this is still open and hour later ends the narrative in my view.
Clearly people aren't cynical enough.
I find it strange no one in this thread has even considered the possibility that the private key of the wallet isn't on the machine.
OP gets their working exploit neatly logged (or even multiple approaches), keeps the money, strengthens the illusion the exploit isn't that bad, and gets a free $500 on top from someone who added to the wallet.
Except, it’s the top entry in HN right now. It could have gone down to the hug 20 minutes after it was posted, so nobody much has had a chance to have a go at it.
This is evidence of absence, though. Unexploited PHP servers are evidence of absence of exploits, and exploited PHP servers are evidence of presence of exploits. “Absence of evidence” would be if there were no PHP servers.
An unexploited PHP server means "there exists a configuration that is not exploitable".
Which is how hundreds of previous exploits have had people publish information on what to temporarily tweak/disable/block, such that the exploit wouldn't work.
What is novel about this case, and for which i do not know the explanation, is that nobody in-the-know was willing to confirm them before the CVE dropped.
If you reframe the perspective from 'free $500 sitting on a server' to 'requires actively utilizing an unreleased 0 day exploit on a server that will certainly be able to track exactly what was done, for a payout of... $500?'
That's pennies for something like this.
Add two zeros and it might get nabbed.
Edit: others have pointed out it's not really a 0-day anymore, they're right, so it's likely more a matter of time.
So you are therefore arguing for the author's point.
The entire exercise is to counter the claim that AI means every script kiddie with tokens can just have their AI create an exploit, and then have their AI scour the internet for vulnerable endpoints. If that were true, then the exploit has very little value, because everyone could make one.
In addition, the claim is that these exploits will all immediately have a thousand bots using them to exploit every possible website, and you can't leave your website vulnerable for a second or it will immediately be owned.
The fact that that hasn't happened to this server already proves the point. Whether professionals can create an exploit from the vulnerability was never the question.
I suppose it may not be there for actually taking it, but it does serve as a good demonstration of the realistic risk for average people running relatively low-value PHP sites. If nobody thinks it's worth the risk of exposure for a quick and easy $1k in Bitcoin (at the time I'm writing this), why would anybody bother hacking a site that's basically worthless, like the dinky little Wordpress blog I run?
This does effectively make the statement that, there probably are exploits out there for this, but even with a non-updated version, you're not at much risk unless someone with serious resources thinks they can make pretty big money from compromising your thing.
random sites generally don't log carefully, or watch their logs if they do. so the risk to hacking them is low. this site almost certainly logs very aggressively. so the risk to hacking it is high.
based on differential risk, attackers will choose targets differently. they might reason that the risk/reward on this obvious trap is not worth it. but on joe shmo's php emporium, the reward is less, but so is the risk, and it might pencil out.
> that's good news because my webserver also has logging
In the future, every website will carry a little blurb of text in the footer of their pages intended to scare off would-be hackers and their AI agents:
“The server of this website employs append-only remote logging and state-of-the-art monitoring and intrusion detection. Unauthorized access or attempts there of WILL be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The outcome of such prosecution is and always will be astronomical amounts of money in damages that the guilty party will pay to the victim, alongside decades of prison time for the party guilty of computer crimes. Do not even try.”
That's always the case for a novel exploit. There isn't a lot of value in popping somebody's PHP blog, so people who've invested time and money into a zero-day exploit have little incentive to use it for that purpose.
The white hats want to extend the time before an exploit is in the hands of the masses who might do so just for the fun of it, and the black hats want to use it on high-value targets.
I think the point is that this is completely the opposite of the narrative that was pushed about this bug - that there would be thousands+ of AI agents actively compromising every vulnerable site automatically regardless of value within minutes of the fix being released into the wild. Well, now it's 3 days after, and this has been up for 3.5 hours, and nobody has taken it yet.
You would have a point if it was still a 0 day. The patch is out, and open source. Anyone who cares has a bunch of the pieces for putting together their own exploit.
Zero days are valuable and kept in the bank to avoid detection. That ship has sailed.
It’s not a 0day it’s now 5 days and counting since disclosure. Nobody is gaining value sitting on an exploit for a vulnerability which is being actively patched.
This logic doesn't work here, because it relies on the premise that you alone potentially have an unreleased zero-day exploit, which is not the case.
If prompting an AI could exploit this for less than $500 in token spend, then you should immediately do so, since if you don't, in a few minutes' time someone else will.
Why not? Those pros have their opportunity to use this exploit dwindling by the hour as news of this and pressure to patch grows and grows. All the major managed hosting companies had this patched in the first 24 hours.
Claude is absurdly sensitive to anything that touches cyber, and threatens bans if it gets a whiff of a pentest going on. it wouldnt surprise me if openai had a similar approach.
Yesterday I joked that claude gave me a cyber stop for asking how to make the anime girl video for an exploit, but it was a thing that happened. Meanwhile im trying to convince people around me that having grok nudify people isnt "fine" just because grok says it is. Its wild where the lines a drawn.
Claude is so absurdly bad about false triggers for security. It kept triggering when I asked it questions about how to plant some tree saplings I got because somehow that was a security risk.
Would you mind copy+pasting the text that you fed it that led to that refusal? That's so bizarre. It would be really interesting to try and guess at what exactly in the message set it off. Over-indexed on biology refusals, perhaps?
I'm in the new CVP, and even Mythos gave me a cyber stop just for creating an MCP server that can remotely connect to my Steam Frame to run commands. It must've thought I was trying to create a centralized malware or something.
Not even sure why Mythos even still exists when it's identical to Fable in every way, including refusing to do stuff that looks like it could ever be repurposed into unapproved use cases.
The whole point of Fable was that it's Mythos but with extra guardrails, yeah. But now that Project Glasswing has been folded into the CVP, Mythos seems to have the exact same guardrails now
We're all naked under our clothes, I don't see the problem. One of the funniest shock-bits I've ever seen was when Jon Stewart's book on American government and history included full-frontal (Photoshopped) nudes of SCOTUS, but I guess he couldn't get away with that during the current era of Puritanical panic.
It's just an adult human body, Michael, what could it cost? One('s) dignity?
Tastelessness aside, this seems perfectly rational to me. Unlike reverse engineering for the purpose of developing security exploits, "nudification" doesn't meaningfully expand the capabilities of malicious actors with access to free online porn and Photoshop.
Today is Sausage Saturday, not Taco Tuesday. Some people like their links and eggs, and... okay, I don't know how to double entendre this next part, but suffice it to say that it's bad faith to assume that everything related to the depiction of the natural human body is about degrading women.
This thread is literally about Grok publicly nudifying women, and people are out here saying it's comparable to seeing somebody's lunch...I know HN is a boys' club and all but this is pretty bad even by normal HN standards.
No one else mentioned women. You're the one who assumed nudification was only of women and only of unwilling subjects. I've seen people use it on pictures of themselves for... enhancement and personal gratification. I've seen men and women use it to make spicy images of adult men. And if we're talking specifically about autonomy and control in depictions of a woman's body, I've seen some women complain about the overzealous guardrails of other image generators, where something as innocent as a touch-up of a photo of their own fully-clothed body was flagged as unsafe.
This issue isn't black and white, and you're casting unearned aspersions. We should have this conversation, in actual good faith.
That's one of the weirdest takes on here in a while.
I can develop security exploits myself just fine without the use of AI. Many people don't have the capability to use Photoshop and free online porn to deepfake someone else they might or might not personally know into a realistic video...
Honestly as someone with faily little experience in pentesting or photoshop but who has dabbled in both back in highschool. I think they would both take a similar amount of practice and skill to develop those abilities. They are complete opposites so i suspect the kind of person who is naturally good at photoshop to be bad at pentesting and vis versa. But if your going to dedicate a few hours of every day to learning a skill i dont think it matters which one you choose, a bit of time, practice, and natural interest and you will be able to do the kind of work that people ask these llms to do.
The major difference being that it usually takes longer to study code because projects can be massive but at the same time the llms are looking for everything and anything while a real attacker is usually looking for specific vulnerabilities in common libraries and such so i wouldnt exactly call the amateur hacker on par with an llm but i would say they could do a similar amount of damage without llm assistance. And photoshop is basically the same. Spend a few hours every day dedicated to one thing and you will learn how to do it.
I'm sure there is more to it than generally "ask Claude". I asked Claude this as a joke and it downgraded all the way to Sonnet before it would answer, and I was previously approved for their dual use cyber program.
The latest POC video for the php2shell exploit features a dancing anime girl. How would you create a video like this?
In nearly every org I've been in or contracted to, the public landing page of the company gets a special place outside of any ops of general technical team, and is instead the work of a marketing group or a "creative" outsourcer who will default to Wordpress on PHP.
Seems like most main company sites at places I've worked. If you are lucky, that WP instance is a fully managed service where they proactively deal with keeping it on the latest PHP, WordPress, and plug-in versions.
We run on SiteGround, and they had the patch up about an hour or so after it dropped and auto upgraded us.
My shit on Wolfi, managed by ChainGuard, a “security company”, didn’t have a patch live hours later.
The funny thing is, people running Wordpress have dealt with 0 day bullshit so often that it’s basically a Tuesday for them, not even a big deal. So hilariously Wordpress folks have plenty of options here simply because it’s been a nasty attack vector for so long and these people are so used to dealing with horrific vulns like this that patching it is actually pretty trivial
This rings extremely true. The good part about it is, unless there's some kind of exceptional factor (e.g. the app.companyname . com cookie using a cookie scoped unwisely to companyname . com), they can go right ahead and do that and while they might get the corpsite homepage pwned and redirected to penis-pill scam sites or something, any truly dangerous actor who gets a foothold there can't do jack shit in terms of actually compromising your valuable data, getting source code, stealing app sessions, etc because that server is not just outside the VPC, it's in a completely different cloud account somewhere far away.
This is how it began and should stay, when IT teams started to get involved in this they ran heavy overhead and aren't clued in on creative requirements. Stick to keeping emails and erp servers up.
I never thought I'd see a browser support list that specifically includes "Dilo" or, in the last few years, "Internet Explorer", but apparently you're comprehensive.
I went to look for unauthenticated CBC mode like every time I see this sort of thing but it's actually GCM mode so, well consider me surprised.
It's in the sysadmin sub because we are routinely the people told buy and manage Grammarly deployments, and we're the people generally cancelling those services now given everyone is being pushed to use their flavor of AI instead. And those emails from users upset that we're doing what management told us to do (following this Grammarly advice)? They go from end users to sysadmins.
The purchase of Tumblr was basically Elon purchasing Twitter without the political gain. I'm amazed the purchase decision was ever made, and more amazed that it still exists after the hit to the user base.
And unlike the Twitter acquisition, Tumblr users basically universally hate its new owner. Twitter has plenty of Elon boosters, but I've never seen someone on Tumblr actually _like_ photomatt.
This might depend what you mean by code. In the sysadmin space I ask a web interface for poweshell to generate specific information multiple times a day, and pasting it into a terminal is really the cleanest workflow on a corporate machine where you have to justify running an executable.
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