Cyberattacks | Vulnerabilities

UK Pulls Services Offline as PHP2Shell Exploit Attempts Surge

Cloudflare reports millions of attempts to exploit PHP’s newly patched php2shell flaws, with no successful breaches confirmed so far.

By Content Team

Oct 23, 2026

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Attackers are trying to exploit the critical PHP flaws dubbed php2shell at scale, two days after the PHP project shipped fixes. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says the company saw thousands of exploitation attempts in the 10 hours before the flaws were announced, rising to millions since. Amazon also saw attempts, but its websites kept running normally. No successful breaches have been confirmed so far.

Under the right conditions, the flaws let an unauthenticated attacker run code on servers running PHP, which security firm Wiz says powers 70% of the world’s websites. In the UK, tech minister Baroness Lloyd told the House of Lords that 32 government services were unavailable and four partially so, largely as a precaution while updates were applied.

Orange also suspended some services globally while it deployed fixes. Researchers scanning for exposed servers say organizations are patching more slowly than hoped, and experts warn the full impact could take months to surface.

Source: BBC News

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