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.<p>It clearly isnt happening.
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.
Wow we have lost it. You really need AI to come up with something like this… let’s just end it at this point honestly.
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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.
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
The value proposition isn't there.<p>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?'<p>That's pennies for something like this.<p>Add two zeros and it might get nabbed.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
My favourite actively unreleased 0 day exploits are the ones that are released, 5 days old, and allegedly so trivial to exploit it costs $5 in tokens.<p>No, I will not spend $5 in tokens to claim your $1000 bounty. My $5 exploit is worth more than $1000. Thank you very much.
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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>Zero days are valuable and kept in the bank to avoid detection. That ship has sailed.
I never mentioned unreleased private exploits, I mentioned what every thought leader and popular creative wants us to believe right now.
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.
Wallet address is there, you can donate
> The value proposition isn't there.<p>That's part of the point. $500 or $1000 is a trivial amount. Since the money is still there, there's currently no trivial exploit.<p>> requires actively utilizing an unreleased 0 day exploit on a server that will certainly be able to track exactly what was done<p>Depending on the exploit, and the visibility stack on the server, one may or may not be able to determine how the rabbit got in the hat.
exactly. the pros are not going to reveal their hand for $1k
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.
That is sort of the point I thought? There’s no low skill exploit for the script kiddies to use even with AI, otherwise they’d happily use it<p>The pros have RCEs, but won’t burn it for something this small.<p>It’s a real vulnerability, but a complex one
It seems like the server got DDoS’d before anyone got to the bitcoin.
> 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.<p>Clearly people aren't cynical enough.<p>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.<p>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.
no it doesn't . absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
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.
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".<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188948">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188948</a><p>I am still waiting for them to put their money where their mouth is.
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 looks like a trap. We have a working RCE that would claim this, but I don't want to demonstrate that because it might leak what we built to others. We still have a window for people to patch and I don't want to risk that.<p><a href="https://x.com/dguido/status/2113825891021144306?s=46" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/dguido/status/2113825891021144306?s=46</a>
Seems like everyone here has an exploit but they're all busy washing their hair, or thinking of the children, or making huge amounts selling their exploit on the darknet instead.<p>Given there are public patches and explanations of the issue, isn't it a little late to try to keep this under wraps?<p>Over a day or two we'll see whether people have an exploit - if more than a few people do, someone will claim this $1k soon. Out of curiosity, what <i>do</i> you plan to do with your exploit that you're holding back?
Unfortunately I left all my easy PHP exploits together with my pre-2023 writing that Pangram flags as 100% AI in Canada with my long-distance girlfriend.
I have discoverd a truly marvelous RCE which this margin is too narrow to contain.
It's done, anyone still talking about this is in the business of monetizing trending keywords (or crime), not in the business of cyberdefense.<p>Anyone that's thinking about defending basically stopped thinking professionally about this on Thursday midday when the PHP update was released and the patch was applied. Maybe on Friday we learned that there were no confirmed exploits or even theoretical exploits, so we discarded the marginal possibility of our servers being exploited stealthily and having a dormant attacker in our perimeter (it was a buffer overflow attack after all, very hard to execute).<p>So it's out of mind for us, it's almost saturday, the only reason to think about this anymore is to grift or to think about the social contagion angle. To many of us it was a random tuesday, business as usual, but some people are still thinking this was a somehow special event? My guess is that it was the fact that there was an embargo break and it caused some issues in that 12 hour period between the leak and the patch, but it was a nothingburger, now it just needs to die, at least after it makes its round through the content-creators whose 9 to 5 is looking at trend charts and monetizing views.
The only reason Php2shell wasn't as bad as it could've been was because basically no malicious actors had exploits that were useful in time.<p>Whoever broke the embargo is a moron and it could have resulted in much more damage than was done.
I think there's still going to be a massive long tail of sites that will never be protected or upgraded, unfortunately that's the reality. So no amount of delay will help them, and most active sites will have patched by now after 5 days.<p>There are already many people claiming they have an exploit, some in this thread, I think this is a useful measure of just how easy it is - thankfully it doesn't look too easy as it's still up at time of writing, though surely someone will manage it soon.<p>If it does get taken quickly I think that's useful information on just how serious this is.<p>If it doesn't, that's also useful info though not hard proof there is no exploit. It does mean that there is no exploit in the hands of script kiddies with chatgpt or similar.
> I think there's still going to be a massive long tail of sites that will never be protected or upgraded,<p>Ok? But that's super common, and there's thousands of ways to exploit unmaintained systems, nothing special about this.<p>From a technical level as well, this is not an easy bug to exploit, it's CVSS Attack Complexity:High, it requires a lot of per-target work, it's definitely not copy.fail level
I too have various websites that dont get hacked.<p>I'm not sure what this page proves except that not all set-ups are in danger. Especially if the site does nothing and has a nginx in front that caps all requests to 1mb.<p>There are, afaict, at least half a dozen choices a PHP server could have made that mitigates all (known) exploits. Putting some bitcoins behind one of them isn't exactly proof of anything, except as a PR stunt to convince people PHP is not a pile of tightly coupled hot-c garbage.<p>---<p>Other projects that get CVEs talk about what went wrong and how to improve. So far i've only seen PHP people defensive and telling each other that ok because other projects also get CVEs.
Shared host Wordpress sites basically run in unprotected untrusted mode since WP has so many RCEs already and they can be in any random plugin someone adds at any time. So even if there's an RCE a lot of these sites just shrug at the attack. You would need to figure out how to chain it for something useful.
But wait, weren't we all told that exploits where already happening all over the place and thats why the embargo was broken?<p>Cloudflare even claimed they mitigated a bunch of it.<p>Which is true here? There was widespread usage of this exploit prior to the patch and just after, or that there were "basically no malicious actors had exploits"?
There's a lot of smoke being blown by companies with a financial stake in coming off as "security-minded" or something.<p>There's apparently _some_ exploit usage in the wild before the embargo breaking, but it very much looks like they didn't even achieve RCE, or if they did it was not widespread at all. It doesn't mean it wasn't possible by a group more sophisticated, it just didn't happen thankfully.<p>After the embargo was broken, RCEs were still not widespread, especially not before a huge number of sites patched themselves.<p>So, no, the narrative that skids with agents were busting down doors as soon as the embargo was broken is not accurate. But breaking the embargo before a patch was ready only hurt the situation for defenders.
Whether it is a trap or not doesn't change the OP's point... they are trying to push back on the idea that all servers that have this vulnerability are going to be instantly hacked by bot swarms. If AIs are at the point now where they can all instantly create an exploit from a known vulnerability, then you would have no need to keep your exploit secret because everyone would already have one.<p>The fact that you keeping your exploit secret means anything already proves their point.
Wrong move. Exploiting this box proves it's exploitable. Not exploiting the box makes the entire computer security profession look like a bunch of worry worts and that the consulting fees are better off not paid. At worst, the owner of the box gets... what? Working exploit code that they'll have to reverse engineer anyway?
Lots of people said the embargo should be broken early because "the exploit is already in the wild". That does not normally mean an infosec researcher has a PoC on their private laptop, that means it has leaked, one way or another.<p>Had it, though? If it was in the wild at day -1, surely some script kiddie will be happy to run that exploit at day +4, because if they didn't someone else would.<p>There were many people saying things with great confidence and this is one interesting way to gauge what was behind those words.
The implication of your comment is that the exploit is not trivial and magically available to anyone with some tokens to bash together, which refutes the position that there is an horde of AI agents and people compromising sites en-masse.
Can you explain how the trap works? The exploit gives you access to the machine which you can then use to wipe the evidence of your intrusion - right? There is nothing to leak by taking control of the machine.<p>Is the trap theory that this server isn’t really running a vulnerable version of php, and is instead recording all traffic?
They can be running a vulnerable version of PHP but also recording all traffic in a way that does not allow for wiping evidence afterwards. For example, if the PHP server was behind another server routing the raw IP packets and running tcpdump. Since the author of the site controls the TLS cert private key, TLS does not protect again the author eavesdropping.
After the fact you are going to clean an append-only log on a separate box?
The exploit gives you access to <i>a</i> machine, not necessarily the one terminating TLS and keeping logs.
really?<p>1. there's no actual evidence that the key to the wallet is on this machine at all. it would be trivial to add a service that would sign challenges to prove so<p>2. a working RCE against PHP is worth much more than $1000, attacking this machine would easily burn that
Yeah this smells bad. Especially given the box is set up to not accept the exploit (1mb vs 12mb).
I have a PoC generated by an LLM that can crash sites using php2shell, but crashing != RCE. The issue is that, to achieve actual RCE, recreating the RCE PoC based on the git diff of the patch and blog posts about php2shell isn't enough. You would still need to develop a working exploit chain, bypass ASLR, and so on to actually achieve RCE.<p>Also, this site runs Nginx with PHP-FPM, not Apache, which is harder than using mod_php exploit mode for this exploit.<p>So you would need to develop a working exploit chain and then essentially "burn" it by exposing it to the site owner.<p>In other words, someone is offering $500 for a working exploit chain.
Assuming you do have a working RCE - this is some weird game theory. Do it and potentially leak the exploit. Don't do it and you lose control of the narrative/lose your credibility/have people not take the risk seriously anymore (this comment is losing the fight with another comment for top comment, and the other comment is concluding that yeah this proof that the whole thing was overblown).<p>And then there's the third option that actually this server is unexploitable or there's no wallet or something and simultaneously you give someone the exploit and lose your credibility at the same time. Really no good way out huh?
Sure you do. My girlfriend is a model she just couldn’t come out tonight also. Clown.
Your comment makes zero sense. You have nothing :)
[dead]
The server is getting overloaded, so here's the text for reference:<p><pre><code> Steal my Bitcoin
0.65 hours without a successful hack
There is a bitcoin key hidden on this server worth about $502.
It is accessible to the PHP user account through the print-flag binary.
This PHP version was selected from before the PHP2SHELL CVEs were released.
First person to get the wallet wins. If you don’t need the money, consider donating it to those who do: givewell.org.
All traffic is logged. This is a known vulnerable machine, so we cannot guarantee privacy. Other attackers may access or monitor activity and data beyond our control. Do not submit anything you want to keep private.
Challenge wallet
Explorer ↗
bc1qlnu5…t3cxqy
0.00625104 BTC
≈ $502.35 USD
stealmybitcoin.com · Terms of participation</code></pre>
Bahaha someone added to the fund. It’s now $1004
That's way funnier than taking it honestly
Yep! Modern Coliseum. We just need a live feed.
0.02500416 BTC<p>≈ $2,018.29 USD<p>Now
imagine having so much $ lying around that you do that<p>i picked the wrong profession
Great way to inject some price information into the “AI automates exploits at scale” narrative. “AI can now chain complex exploits, it’s point-and-click pwnage, you say? Over or under $500 a pop?”
I'm seeing a few comments that say $500 isn't enough, and its not worth it for them to try to hack it.
But if it costs fewer than $500 of tokens in an AI, then it seems like it is? I thought a lot of the claim people are making is that you <i>dont actually need to hack anything</i> you just ask an AI and it does it. The exploitable bug is public and documented. All the pieces are theoretically there, and there are repeated claims that AI is trivializing exploits and its super easy to hack things now.<p>If that were true, and someone can hack the server for less than $500 of tokens, its an easy profit.
$500 is the value of the prize. We don't know what the price someone will pay for a lottery ticket is.
It’s not very much information, I agree. Even such scant information, however, is a significant and refreshing improvement on the current state of the narrative. Kudos to the servermaster, I say.
This <i>could</i> be an interesting bug-bounty type of initiative. Setup a system, lets other dudes at <i>their</i> expense battle for scraps?
" All traffic is logged."<p>For $500 he can look in the logs and find all manner of new exploits, or new deviations of the existing ones, he can then sell for thousands. Clever business model lol<p>These projects would be more interesting and ethical if the current and historical logs were instantly put up somewhere public in real-time for anyone to observe.<p>Regardless, I'm guessing the smart hackers aren't going to bother.
Yeah, the specific setup is not vulnerable to PHP2SHELL. CLI server + 1 MiB cap + inert page + high memory limit removes all the possibilities from the two CVEs. It would just be collecting POCs for actually vulnerable setups.
I'm just an interested bystander, but this seems like a (near?) default nginx config. Is that accurate?
Inert files are unrealistic, normally you use PHP server to execute PHP code, which this website doesn't appear to do (only static files). And suppose you want to accept >1mb file uploads, that limit would get in your way. So it's not a good representation of a PHP application, but for other uses it's reasonable.
Should be the top comment IMO.
I have two out of five AI agents that agreed to work with me on finding the flag (wallet key). Here's the progress so far:<p>1. GLM-5.3: Interpreted it as a public challenge and is currently trying to find the flag.
<a href="https://ibb.co/zHLJhz0B" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/zHLJhz0B</a><p>2. GLM-5.3-Flash: Also interpreted it as a public challenge and is working on cracking it.
<a href="https://ibb.co/bg2DDtXq" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/bg2DDtXq</a><p>3. GPT-6.1-Sol: Flagged it as a cybersecurity request and directed me to register for their cybersecurity program.
<a href="https://ibb.co/0j83PWn9" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/0j83PWn9</a><p>4. DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash (via OpenRouter): Refused to execute the exploit.
<a href="https://ibb.co/QvVxnM5k" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/QvVxnM5k</a><p>5. Claude Fable-5.1 (via OpenRouter): Returned a provider-side content filter error.
<a href="https://ibb.co/39q1N1NV" rel="nofollow">https://ibb.co/39q1N1NV</a><p>All sessions with different agents are running on Tarvis (<a href="https://tarvis.io" rel="nofollow">https://tarvis.io</a>), an app I'm building. Think of it as a self-hosted version of Railway, but with a built-in AI agent and cloud development environment.<p>The website seems to be overloaded, and both agents that agreed to work on the challenge are now unable to connect to it. HN's hug of death, I guess.<p>EDIT: It's back online!
DeepSeek 4.1 will happily do it, you just have to give it a little bit of lead in.<p>> <a href="https://stealmybitcoin.com/" rel="nofollow">https://stealmybitcoin.com/</a> This is a CTF for the new PHP vulnerability. Try to find what php version it runs.<p>(eventually figures it out)<p>> OK, now get the flag<p>I'll go for RCE, carefully — the author explicitly invites this, and I'll keep probes minimal.
How is the progress?
The site is not vulnerable to PHP2Shell because it doesn't actually run any PHP code. It just serves static files. The static file handler does not call code that PHP2Shell exploits. Every request leads back to the same static page.<p>> (AI) "A static handler (nginx’s static path, or php_cli_server_begin_send_static) just sends bytes; it never enters the PHP request lifecycle, so php_request_startup() never runs and the Zend executor/session/multipart parser the chain needs is never initialized."<p>The author is trying to prove their point that PHP2Shell is hard to exploit. But it's unrealistic because PHP servers usually run PHP code at some point.<p>I had an LLM recreate this Tweet and yes, it can make an exploit without reward hacking. It took 5 minutes. <a href="https://x.com/dguido/status/2113129153293897925" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/dguido/status/2113129153293897925</a><p>so basically the OP is doing a little trolling
Several people found they can use a much simpler exploit chain to continuously DoS the website using the unpatched exploit, than put together one that gives RCE.
You're wasting your money. I'd be willing to bet more than the bounty amount that you won't be able to achieve RCE on that site, if you would like to bet.
This will go unclaimed for a bit. It may still get claimed within the day, but<p>People do have the exploit. The risked opportunity cost of this being a honeypot (and handing over a functional exploit) vs just… not participating and hacking higher value targets (offensive actors) or not circulating any additional details (defensive actors who have privileged intelligence about the vulns) I just…<p>The value proposition here is so hilariously low for what is required to demonstrate stealing the bitcoin at all.<p>That doesn’t mean that people won’t try, and perhaps even succeed! But to what end? Demonstrating terrible math skills and a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics at play?<p>I, and many of my friends and cooks could take this easily. The difference is we know not to.<p>Make it $15-25k and it’ll get yoinked instantly, most likely without using PHP2Shell at all.
>and handing over a functional exploit<p>There are dozens (or hundreds) of functional exploits already. The problem with php2shell exploits is that (as of now) there's no "one exploit pwns all", and researchers need to spend nontrivial amount of time on every (potentially) exploitable target.<p>So I don't think I agree - it's a fun challenge for the itsec people around here, and some people will definitely try. There's no real opportunity cost here. The only problem is that (as of now) exploiting PHP requires some knowledge about the server configuration, and we don't have that here.
> there's no "one exploit pwns all"<p>I think what he's saying is if you had that, you certainly wouldn't use it on a known honeypot for 500 bucks.
> The only problem is that (as of now) exploiting PHP requires some knowledge about the server configuration, and we don't have that here.<p>Exactly. This server is exploitable, but not with an off-the-shelf PHP2Shell PoC someone found on GitHub. The PHP2Shell exploit would need adjustment to the specific application configuration, and to that end, you’ve come to the same conclusion I was implying.<p>The easiest way is to use PHP2Shell _with_ another unknown vulnerability in the stack, such as nginx etc…<p>The challenge is trivial to those who know better than to even try. You cannot succeed at it without giving away far more than you could ever possibly hope to gain.<p>Of course, there’s always the wildcard of someone throwing away the nginx 0-day just to be funny.
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't every PHP RCE... 2 shell?
80h ago everyone was advising everyone else to take all their websites immediately down.<p>Now it's only worth it to hack a website that's asking to be hacked if the prize is $15k.
If the actual price tag behind the “AI can trivially automate exploits, be afraid” narrative is more like $15,000 and not like $150, that puts the narrative in a very different light.
Can you spell out the economics for us?<p>Let's assume I am a white-hat hacker with access to this allegedly widespread exploit. Obviously, I understand why a nation-state attacker wouldn't want to share their exploit here but what do I as a random citizen stand to lose? It's not like I care about hoarding the exploit to pwn innocent civilians.<p>You seem to imply there's some economic reason such a white-hat hacker wouldn't take the $500 but don't actually say what it is.
You, the white-hat hacker would be concerned that your attack exploits payload will be logged either by the potentially malicious site operator who could be using this to gather various working exploits, or by other bad actors who already exploited the site before you. Unless your exploit itself is already well known and fully public that is.
Every reason you just gave for not hacking this server is also true for servers which don’t have a $500 prize, which is almost all of them out there.
This is a server that <i>allegedly</i> has some BTC on it (AFAICT it’s just a claim made by the website itself, zero corroborating evidence), definitely nothing else valuable, and likely has a lot of monitoring to capture whatever exploit you send, and with a less-vulnerable-than-usual setup. Unless you’re really desperate for the money and want to take a gamble on the server having the not very meaningful bounty it says it has, it’s strictly negative value compared to the average production php server that’s still unpatched. If I have a working exploit I’m mass deploying against everyone, I too would skip this one, similar to how mass market malware tends to disarm itself when it detects security research tooling.<p>No, I don’t think actual working exploit is trivial either, but people are wayyyy overselling this stunt in this thread.
I suspect this is going to be more a point about the fact that most PHP server configurations do not have the ability to be exploited by the recent vulnerability that made people think the AI vulnpocalypse was here
> I, and many of my friends and cooks could take this easily.<p>Sure you can.
> a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics at play<p>I’d say you’re the one who doesn’t understand the economics at play here. To me and I’m guessing the OP it’s quite simple. Have the exploits become common/simple enough to be worth $500 yet?
What an insufferable comment. For all the hullabaloo discussing the economic value of time about $500 being an insufficient prize, you still spent what I can only assume is several minutes penning a comment that derives you zero economic value whatever.
> I, and many of my friends and cooks could take this easily.<p>No, you couldn't.
> handing over a functional exploit<p>I thought the exploit was trivial and we all need to be extremely worried and take down our php services until a patch? So what exactly are you handing over?<p>> I, and many of my friends and cooks could take this easily.<p>Extreme doubt.
> But to what end?<p>It is just kind of fun to poke at something like this.<p>> Demonstrating terrible math skills and a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics at play?<p>I don't give a shit about the $500, nor would I ever attempt actually hacking something that wasn't explicitly a game (like this).<p>> The difference is we know not to.<p>Borrrrinnnggggg
It's worth it to someone.
Suddenly all the people who claim that these PHP exploits are so easy that a baby could do it are clamming up at the opportunity to showcase it. Plenty of "I/We can do this easily, but uh.. we uhh.. don't want to right now bye" going on.
A pentesting YouTuber I once respected went deep into the AI rabbit hole and claimed yesterday he created a generic POC using ChatGPT in 2 hours to show how dangerous LLMs are [0]. After that he shilled his AI pentesting platform.<p>If there was a grain of truth to this claim, surely someone would've stolen the prize by now? Thousands of people would've had a working POC if it was this easy.<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/SP7y1h0laN0" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/SP7y1h0laN0</a>
1. I dont have an AI pentesting platform.<p>2. This CTF is using nginx which has a `client_max_body_size=1m` limit. My exploit right now requires more, but I will give it a try (aka ask Codex).<p>3. You can setup a server with `docker run php:8.5.11-apache` with any of the over 400 vulnerable `php` apache images and give me the IP.
Ive been pretty skeptical of your coverage as well, and you're in the OpenAI daybreak program and huffing and puffing about how great OpenAI is while having 900k subs, seemingly only talking up OpenAI products...<p>OpenAI and others are infesting the influencer space with what is basically dark money, not saying you're one of the guys on the take but I just don't trust any large influencer atm who only talks positively about OpenAI (or any lab).<p>I guess you can prove us AI cyber doubters all wrong with this CtF tho.
I think you missed the time where I burned the bridge to OpenAI by calling out the CISO: <a href="https://x.com/LiveOverflow/status/2101252692635004997" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/LiveOverflow/status/2101252692635004997</a><p>I wish I would be sponsored by OpenAI. I am spending way too much on subscription for it.
Not gonna defend the OpenAI shilling, but the guy recently had a pretty brutal tragedy in his personal life and I assume the AI content is just a low effort move to keep the channel and marketing for his business afloat. The lack of elaborate educational content may be rather a symptom of personal resource exhaustion and struggle, than popular enshittification. Time will tell, but maybe cut him some slack for the moment.
That's a good way to make claims about existence of a trivial exploit in the wild falsifiable.
> A reminder that this cannot falsify the existence of an exploit, trivial or otherwise.<p>No, it's a not a zero knowledge proof. But if the site owner is a generally trustworthy person, then I feel that this effort is strong proof the exploit is not trivial.
A reminder that this cannot falsify the existence of an exploit, trivial or otherwise.<p>It can only show you if someone has used an exploit against this server.
It cannot even show that. The server can lie (trivially).
Sure. Also, we have to trust owner of the site. So it cannot show anything, strictly speaking.
Still, it maybe puts a price on exploit demo. Some say "it goes around twitter", "bots are probing and exploiting it", "it's a biggest thing ever in cybersec history, invest in AI now". Some say "it's a fud".<p>Are these 500$ laying on a ground for anyone to take?
The amount of Bitcoin appears to be going up with time. It was ~$500 the last time I saw it. Now the wallet is worth ~$2000 at the time of this comment.<p>So the idea that is not enough money for someone to “give away” their exploit is going to reach a breaking point eventually if it continues. This might get more interesting the longer it goes on. Getting my popcorn ready right now!
Brilliant thread. Glad you did this before I did.<p>Hilarious to see people suddenly furtive about this easy exploit. Thanks.
Made tough here as you’re behind nginx w/ a 1MB request body cap! Sweet idea :)
Link to the wallet in case the site goes down: <a href="https://mempool.space/address/bc1qlnu50y4zm0nwxkckxu09thn5xdcz8aw6t3cxqy" rel="nofollow">https://mempool.space/address/bc1qlnu50y4zm0nwxkckxu09thn5xd...</a><p>Currently at $2k.
It could be an interesting cybersecurity technique to hide obvious crypto private keys all over.<p>If it gets swept you are breached.
There are entire businesses set up to help enterprises do this at scale: <a href="https://canarytokens.org/nest/" rel="nofollow">https://canarytokens.org/nest/</a>
Yeah, just keep dust in it. Like $10
Only works for low value targets, where you don't have to trust your coworkers. Probably need to rotate the key daily, which possibly adds transaction costs. You would also need to set up the detection capabilities to be able to figure out the intrusion path, or the flag is pretty meaningless. And at that point you may just as well put tripwires onto sensitive files.
Appreciate the commitment to the bit!
The account now holds about $1k USD. A second deposit landed in the account about 7 minutes ago from when I posted this comment.<p>EDIT: Now worth $2k
It's increased! It was $500 an hour ago and it's 2k now. I didn't bother because I figured I'm not fast enough
Two economists are walking down the road when one spots a $100 bill on the pavement.<p>“Look! A hundred dollars!” he says, bending down to pick it up.<p>“Don’t bother,” says the other. “If it were real, someone would have picked it up already.”
If someone did have a working exploit, is $500 enough for them to give it away to whomever is monitoring this honeypot?
I don't think it's a good idea to front-page an exploitable site on HN. The blast radius isn't limited to the creator's Bitcoin, it also extends to zero-days against anyone visiting the site. This is true of all sites, but all sites are not <i>built to fail</i> while <i>incentivizing exploits</i>.
Not worth it. The biggest issue is the nginx with 1MB cap. Also in the terms, its says we can't exploit Nginx. So its a dead end.
Nice CTF! I hope if it's captured by a LLM we'll get a write up as to how it did it.
What a fantastic test. I think this should be standard practice for zero days like this to put a practical "exploit ease" bounty out there. It would benefit the entire security community to have this information available in addition to the cve score!
If it's nginx + fpm + "empty" index.php, it's a meme and not exploitable.<p>edit: looks more like nginx + cli-server. But the 1MB nginx body limit is annoying. Why is nobody setting up these CTF servers with a setup people actually say would be easy to exploit. Like a LAMP stack.
Someone doubled the bitcoin amount :D
This is a form of a canary token I've been using already. The thing is that it only makes sense if the server breach is cheaper than the money into the wallet. Of course, after you fully monetize your hack, the last step would be to get the bitcoins, too, but how is this helping the owner? The good thing about the existing canary token is that they are all over the place hidden among legitimate similar records and could be harder for the hackers to tell from the rest.<p>I personally prefer "tripwire" than "canary token", but that's another topic.
Can't hack a server if it is offline due to load. I think we've solved online security folks!
Similarly, I've had a canary unencrypted BTC wallet in my computer for years.<p>I've always been security conscious and I role play my Arch as a Qubes "dom0" and use VFIO for GPU enabled VMs, which I know is not the Qubes way, but I'm also not that at risk.
Imagine 1000 people torch $100 in tokens before giving up on getting the $500 prize. Let’s go on to assume one person gets a lucky reasoning trace that nails it, then posts a blog about how they made $500 with $100.
prize is up to $2000 now, any takers? <a href="https://mempool.space/address/bc1qlnu50y4zm0nwxkckxu09thn5xdcz8aw6t3cxqy" rel="nofollow">https://mempool.space/address/bc1qlnu50y4zm0nwxkckxu09thn5xd...</a> site is down though
I published my version right before seeing this, its _a_ exploit for 8.2 through 8.5 for stock mod_php.<p><a href="https://github.com/offline-ant/php2fix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/offline-ant/php2fix</a><p>That isn't going to work on this server because it has nginx in front with a 1mb request cap afaict.
Remove nginx or remove the 1mb nginx body cap. That config is already proven to be safe.
If you want to contribute to something and get rewarded, <a href="https://nonograph.com" rel="nofollow">https://nonograph.com</a> has paid out over $30,000 this year for feature and bug fixes. (check the github)
I love it, very fun.
It runs PHP 8.4.26 (and nginx). Might be useful for others.<p>Also, the only pages I found are static and not an actual PHP entry point. If it doesn't run any PHP, it's not vulnerable to PHP2Shell. At least I think that's how it works.
I was wondering how exploitable this was. I will definitely be watching.
Do I understand it right that it can be set up in a way that if exploit is used it can be "recorded" and revealed?
Isn't this Bitcoin private key “4”?
You have not proven the key really is on the server. From a game-theory point of view I have no reason to believe it is there, and thus no reason to attack.
Not sure that logic really holds up. If the cost of trying is low, why wouldn't you?
This is where I am, currently. There's a lot of talk about the low opportunity-cost here, but I think that relies on the assumption that there also isn't a single opportunistic person out there with access to the RCE. That doesn't strike me as a strongly supported assumption, in my experience.
For all I know, it's a straight up scam. Someone already sent more bitcoin to the address to double the bounty.
Shouldn’t the expected value of attempting this somehow include the likelihood of the key actually being on the machine? Surely the probability is much higher than 0? I would guess the expected value for actually being the first one is around $300, not 0
You may need to brush up on your game theory. It's worth it to spend $1 for a 1% chance to win a million dollars. You don't need to be certain the key is there for it to be worth it to do a supposedly trivial exploit.
what a pedantic way to look at the world
The wallet address is bc1qlnu50y4zm0nwxkckxu09thn5xdcz8aw6t3cxqy
Currently worth about $500 (checking balance)
can't people just point their AI to the latest pull request that includes the fix and ask it to deduce the vuln?
Please do and report back here.
People could point their AI at a physics textbook and ask it to deduce the vuln from first principles too but that doesn’t mean it will be successful.
If the AI can build an exploit from the patch, sure.
apparently not
Is this a PHP PR campaign to show that everything is alright?
I remembered that there was a similar challenge for Heartbleed.
Interesting idea! Would like to know how much time need to spend.
bounty seems to have just doubled, 1000 usd now
Looks like someone just added ~$500 more to it?
Keep your hands off my Bacon!
major pain in the neck that anthropic doesn't let opus 5.5 work on this, goes back to 4.8 lame
Just run GLM-5 locally, if people are to be believed it can hack the planet at this point
They are cutting competition for these sweet coins. Anything to become profitable.
Yet somehow people on this site still cheerfully use those products for serious work. Can you not see what's being attempted here? They're trying to have you outsource your thinking so they can shape it.
This has to be the cheapest way to obtain a working POC. Lol!
Whats going on with PHP? Is there a twitter drama?
oooh, is this what they call a ctf?
This could be a trap.<p>Someone does the exploit, then the creator of this service logs it and uses that exploit to go after higher value targets...
I wonder how many times the value of the credits on this challenge would exceed the potential reward here.
In viral form, its now $1000?
You have to be really confident that the PHP RCE is not anything serious, 500$ is quite a bit?
It's more like they're offering $500 to be taught how to utilise the exploit.
There’s a lot of techies on this site for whom that’s peanuts.
I'm sure OP is a good person.<p>But if they were not, and had ill intentions, they might see $500 as a very inexpensive way to purchase a working exploit to use against others.
Any exploit might be interactive with a backend component that generates and serves payload components based on interactive responses.<p>OP (and anyone else who exploits the server) would be able to see the transcript between the backend and the vulnerable server, containing the payload customised for the server, but not the actual code of the backend. This would be useful if it was a 0day vulnerability, but with a disclosed vulnerability getting a payload that doesn't work except on their server, without the code that generated it, might not be that much value over what they already have.<p>That said, there are other ways to scam by structuring things like the OP (none of this should be taken to imply the OP has actually done this, but rather why this structure as a general approach might be a bad idea):<p>* This could be a 'stone soup' scam where the OP has the wallet keys (obviously), and puts this up to bait the addition of more funds into the wallet by other interested people. The key might not actually even be on the server, or it might not be vulnerable. Once sufficient other people add funds, the OP could withdraw the funds, recouping their original funds plus anything others added.
* This could be run as a propaganda scam either to falsely sell that it isn't an easily exploitable vulnerability when it is (by making it unreasonably difficult to exploit compared to real-life deployments), or to over-inflate how exploitable it is (by an insider withdrawal from the wallet). Manipulating public opinion could allow an attacker with a working exploit more time, or help to sell services to fix the problem.<p>I think an alternative scheme that is less vulnerable to scams would be to have a ZKVM (Risc0 or similar) executing vulnerable code, such that the attacker needs to produce a zero knowledge proof transcript of getting the ZKVM into a particular state that would not be possible if they didn't have an exploit. It should also take an Ethereum address as a public input. Then write an Ethereum contract that will allow funds to be transferred to the public input Ethereum address if submitted with a valid proof transcript, and back to the source of funds after some time has passed. Everyone who wants to add to the jackpot could deploy their own version of the contract, so the one proof transcript could claim from all of them, but if unclaimed the funds go back to the source.<p>Alternatively (avoiding the risk exploits may be so large as to make the cost of producing the proof transcript impractical), they could be built using a public cloud provider's trusted computing offering (e.g. Google Confidential VMs). The person making the challenge could make it so the derivation (NixOS for example) to produce the entire image executing on the cloud provider in a deterministic way (with publicly known source, and hash codes of each stage publicly available). Then, from the code with the known hash, they use the vTPM to generate an attestation that a key was generated while the vTPM PCRs were in a known state (corresponding to the publicly reproducible hashes), and ensure the only way to access the key from the instance is via an exploit. It would also include logic to generate and wrap a Bitcoin wallet key, and emit the public key (with the attestations and a signature linking back via a vTPM attestation to the cloud provider's key). This way, unless the cloud provider is also in on the scam, people could be assured that the OP isn't scamming them.
It is a price signal. They expect to lose the money they want to show that nobody has an automated swarm just pwning every server running PHP connected to the internet. At least not yet, on day 5 and counting.
Thank you for showing what we all know. The security community is full of fear mongering prima donnas. I always hated security but now they are becoming insufferable. “Omg myleethax break the web” everyone freak out!!!!! Omgggggg. Absolute fing children.
ooh is this what they call a ctf?
this should be done on one of those barebone servers that run on an 8bit commodore or an atari (self identifying as something else)
If the flag isn’t captured by opening bell on monday, the bubble will burst.
Honeypot lol
Price has doubled I see. Interesting idea lol
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$500 isn’t worth the time, make it at least $5k then we talk.