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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

For me, what was strange is there were no write-ups on how the vulnerability actually worked. It really does feel like a lot of people went "Claude found a bug, and Claude says it's dangerous" but no one actually verified how exploitable it actually is? Not to say its worth ignoring, but compared to Heartbleed (where exploits had to be written by hand) there are a lot fewer active PoCs.

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There are multiple write-ups on how the vulnerability works. The Calif one is the most detailed. Also, no one used Claude. There's a whole world of information out there when you read the original sources instead of social media distortions.

https://calif.io/php2shell/

https://www.wiz.io/blog/php2shell-php-rce

> Calif identified a critical flaw using GPT‑5.6 Sol as part of our Patch the Planet initiative, with Wiz also independently discovering and reporting both vulnerabilities

https://openai.com/index/coordinated-disclosure-of-critical-...

> Using Gemini 4 Argon, the team at Wiz has shown why frontier AI is a game-changer for cyber defense. For over a decade, these critical vulnerabilities remained unaddressed because vulnerability discovery and exploitation were incredibly complex.

- Raluca Ada Popa, Head of Gemini Security, Google DeepMind

See? No Claude. Never mind that other man behind the curtain

Claude is the new Hoover.

Neither of those are Claude. Checkmate.

They even did try Claude Mythos earlier in the year, and it didn't find this. There's a reason "no-one used Claude" for this now.

"Earlier this year, we worked with Alpha-Omega to scan PHP with Anthropic's Claude Mythos. But since the Mythos scan, we have added other tools, including OpenAI's Daybreak Red for validating reports and exploits, alongside sanitizer builds and reproduction environments that match our CI on every platform PHP supports."

https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/21/todays-php-securit...

The fact that Mythos didnt find this is pretty damning for Anthropics claims.

Haven't you heard? The popular thing to do nowadays is to accuse someone of using AI the second anything is produced whatsoever.

Interestingly enough there are papers that suggest that AI feeding on itself will degrade output quality over time. What I've noticed from my peers is that everything produced now looks the same, and they're sick of it.

Someone had to say it:

DSHR's Blog

I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Coprophagia Is Bad For You

https://blog.dshr.org/2026/06/coprophagia-is-bad-for-you.htm...

I do tend to disclose my use of AI, but at the same time I don't feel like I'm required to. I'm doing it to signal that my use of AI was productive, and of value to people beyond myself.

but... Calif have said that AI did find this bug.

This is the official exploit video in the writeup - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfWZrdzvooc

This is the least professional Video I’ve ever seen for anything like this. I can’t even follow what’s happening on screen.

that's the point: it essentially shows (notice the --profile-flag) the work of 2 months making the exploit work reliably on every app-php/fpm-linux-combination. The only purpose is to spread fear - and then have 50% of the internet update to a patched version with 425 changed files reviewed by ~100people and their clankers at 1400 UTC sharp while for the vast majority (using fpm like recommended for ~10years everywhere...) disabling the progress-something-flag and (optionally...) disabling multipart-uploads would have nicely mitigated this.

> disabling the progress-something-flag and (optionally...) disabling multipart-uploads would have nicely mitigated this.

I wouldn't be so sure. Many vulnerabilities have been "fixed" by blocking the particular ingress path of the demo exploit, and then it turns out that there were plenty more ways to exploit the bug, they just picked the easiest one.

Yep, perhaps turning off the feature doesn't stop the data from being parsed.

Have you tried asking Claude? Maybe we're in the age of agent-to-agent communication /s

The video looks like it's making this whole thing out to be a joke. Everything about it conveys a lack of seriousness. The dancing cartoon character, the ascii art, the music, the whiz-bang visual effects that obscure anything interesting or useful.

this video made the government websites go offline and patch their servers.

Was it parroting and cargo-culting in an unfortunate chain of events?

yes, that is the criticism.

> The Calif one is the most detailed. Also, no one used Claude.

be me

click link

typical ai-designed website

"it's not claude"

AI generated comics for your CVEs, I can't even anymore

"Comic illustrated by Stephanie Cortes of Ibis Craft.

Poster and comic story by Michal Zalewski (@lcamtuf) of Calif."

I'm not sure if this is better or worse. Why needlessly expand the in-the-know circle for fluff like this.

well that either sucks for them or it's pathetically petty, cause it is clearly positioned in a way and on a website to look like AI slop as best as it can

if I were a serious cartoon artist, I would complain for taking the piss

Is the calif website supposed to be a parody?

I'm not saying the 'Claude says this is bad so therefore it's bad' is at the heart of this PHP vuln, but I'm also seeing the same phenomenon in workplace settings with 'meatproxy'-behavior of so much AI use that tends to overfit and hyperfocus on narrow issues, that then punts the work to other people in ways that just waste time (whereby pre-AI, humans would simply not have the capacity to investigate minuscule issues so they'd never be reported as such). But these days, it's just hardcore meatproxy and reverse centaur vibes all over the place (people just acting as the face of AI, and creating so much work that the other people can't really keep up with any of it anymore), and I wouldn't be surprised if that's happening to some extent in infosec more broadly too. (not saying the vulns and exploits aren't real - but there's definitely a long tail of them now where only a few are deserving of a lot of attention, patching, mitigations etc).

Agreed. The only main post was somebody on jackly something .com who overdosed on the matrix and communication skills of a squirrel picking random tokens from a dozen trees.

I'm actually curious if a lot of shit got hacked because so far it doesn't seem so. Though it seems like it should have? We always see these catastrophic vulnerabilities showing up but when are the ones where it is actually just widespread publicly dumping databases everywhere and at a point where someone non technical even registers 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?

> How would you create a video like this?

You would need to hire the team that made the original video (which as of this comment has 148 million views)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_zad39Uhw

The writeups showed up after 14UTC, after the embargo. All of those clowns sharing non working PoCs didn't actually know the bug, they only contributed to the general hysteria

Lot of non-working PoC and slop are actually good because they waste hackers time to find the working exploit.

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