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They (is it the CEO?) commented on it earlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735

In their place I would worry that this was the last time anyone shared an embargoed build with them.

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Let's hope so. Shall we create a new norm? A 365 day timeout, for companies like Chainguard that deliberately break embargoes.

Very irresponsible behaviour in my opinion; and if it's a decision made unilaterally by their CEO, probably a breach of their SOC 2 certification. What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix, don't worry, we're making this free!"

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Nah, Chainguard should be praised for this. It was a different company that leaked the POC early, and then PHP, Wiz, OpenAI, and Calif sat on their hands doing nothing while the vuln was being actively exploited in the wild. Chainguard did the right thing by getting the fix out as quick as possible to stop the bleeding (or gushing flow of blood, really) rather than sitting on it so they could make a coordinated marketing post, like the others did.
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That's a reasonably take. Embargos only work until the information's leaked, and once that's happened, however it happened, the bad guys have the exploit information and the clock starts ticking.
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PHP’s view is that Chaingiard started the clock because the video was insufficiently detailed. Not sure if that is the case, but just sharing I had a different reading of the statement.
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It was being discussed on here hours prior to the Chainguard release.
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>... Wiz, OpenAI, and Calif sat on their hands doing nothing while the vuln was being actively exploited in the wild.

What was Wiz/OpenAI supposed to do? PHP was already aware of the issue.

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But did they "get the fix out"?

They released some binaries, built for their own docker image based on their own Linux distro. Other people couldn't use Chainguard's "fix" to patch their own systems. The only people who seem to have benefited from the stunt are the hackers who used AI to reverse-engineer the binaries and write exploits.

That was a giant fuck-you to the rest of the PHP ecosystem, nothing more.

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> It was a different company that leaked the POC early,

[citation needed]

By which i mean, this seems untrue. If you mean the anime video, that is not a leak of a PoC.

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I think multiple companies didn't respect the embargo, in different ways.

That can be for marketing purposes or by mistake. Not sure how to deal with that.

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Chainguard effectively held everyone hostage, and forced everyone hosting container images and wanting to be online, to trust their builds and then saying they did it for "free" to get free advertisement. Incredibly irresponsible behavior. They used this as a big fat advertisement board.

Dont trust us with information lol.

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A security vendor entrusted with advanced patches breaking embargo, is much worse than a security researcher breaking embargo.
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> What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix [...]"

https://www.chainguard.dev/athena

https://www.chainguard.dev/unchained/this-shit-is-hard-build...

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I dunno, the post is awfully critical of Chainguard for leaking a fixed binary 6 hours early, but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic (not to mention spawning millions of agents crawling the php codebase and trying to brute force a POC and probably using more energy than a lot of countries in the process).
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i keep seeing mentions of the video, but is it still available anywhere?
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https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944

Song is Petite Meller - High Forever (Marlon Hoffstadt Remix). Which is annoyingly catchy

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wow, okay. yes, that really does look like a "my first PoC" video made by an early teenager. hard to believe that this was produced by a company that wants to be taken seriously.

thanks.

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If anything this is further justification for why these patches need to be kept under wraps.

This industry is full of immature children who cannot keep their mouths shut for 24 hours. They have no clue what massive coordination this requires.

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These 'immature children' have discovered the exploit, so good luck keeping it under wraps from themselves.
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There do seem to be the perpetual problem with the field of computer security that only insufferable and immature kids matter, due to discrete math adjacent nature of computer science, and yet they also legitimately can't be trusted, or does it not... unless LLMs do change everything.
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The management class is certainly itching to ditch the remaining nerds.
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Any idiot can create their own company. For example, I have one :)
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they claim 60 full time employees
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Any idiot can work for any idiot that starts a company!
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I wish people would name this idiotic company, I can't see Twitter here and all people are talking about is a childish video they made. I don't ever want to do business with said company, ever.

They're apparently not trustworthy, and behave as children.

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It's Calif. They're named in the post.

>As a result of the leak and pre-announcement around 20:00 UTC, Calif, one of the security firms that had reported the issues mistakenly published a video. It showed their proof of concept working against a number of targets and revealed a few additional, though limited, details about the vulnerabilities.

You can see the same demo video on their site: https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce

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That gif is a segment from Shukusei!! Loli Kami Requiem by Shigure Ui, the illustrator-VTuber-singer, FWIW...

1: https://youtu.be/Ci_zad39Uhw?t=15

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Agree. If I'm following along correctly, it seems Calif is really the one to blame not Chaingaurd.
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Both are to blame.

Calif more than Chainguard, but still Chainguard too.

Calif was obviously twitching to claim credit for their findings, and what I find troubling is this eagerness was more important to them than giving users a chance to update their systems.

Even if they ended up waiting only a day post release I would still say it seems a bit too soon. Maybe a week after. Not everyone’s system have aggressive patching schedules and PHP is soo heavily used.

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This is probably the future, tho. Being first to disclose a vuln is a Big Deal in some quarters. And now, the velocity of AI driven pentest swarms mean every researcher who finds something worthwhile has to think "how close is the next droog's swarm to finding what I found" and the temptation to jump the gun only gets stronger.
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The video has no usable details in it.

It's maybe not professional to release an omg panic video, but not even remotely the same thing as what chainguard did.

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I don't know, it's showing most sites being pwnd in less than 20s with some taking just under 30s. Of course, that's on homeboy's local Mac. Not sure how long it takes to gain control with PHP2Shell to run the exploit though. Just started looking at that part myself
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So, just because they showed they can doesn't mean they showed how.

I dont know why the timing of the bug is surprising to you.

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there were security guys publishing inferred details from [INFO] messages, it did contain more than zero usable details
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Everything i saw on twitter prior to the release turned out to be incorrect. At most people figured out it had something to do with session upload handler and UAF, but nobody knew what.
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> but it was the research firm "partner" that "mistakenly" posted the dancing anime POC video over 24 hours early that created the mass panic

They took it down but someone (Kirill Firsov: https://x.com/k_firsov/status/2112641845926989944) added the anime stuff and reposted it. Totally irresponsible.

Edit: okay he didn't add the anime, but he reposted it.

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The company, Calif, has it with the music, effects and Ui Shigure animation on their own website and youtube channel: https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce
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I think I'm too old for this industry

I want to go back to talks by bored defcon guys or gals calmly stating how they obtained private keys of a globally trusted CA with just a bit of math. Which, mind you, ate the other part of the teams time.

Now I know how much I hustled today likely due to that atrocity of a video. I think I will take a vacation day and sit in a forest near a river on friday.

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what's up with the obsession of these people with anime children?
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dopamine junkies crave stimuli, and realistic details of humans are just noise for the data. anime humans are simplified to extremis which alone makes some people think it's about kids
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good god that video is absolutely horrible. why is stuff blurred then the same blurred stuff is suddenly all visible? nothing changed.
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it's called creative licensing. you can't account for taste though.
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I kinda get Chainguard's position here. They were part of the embargo, saw exploits hitting in the wild already and decided to release rather than hold things back.

Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.

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Did they actually see exploits in the wild? The PHP Foundation team disputes this, and say they didn't observe any working PoC capable of an exploit.
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The person who wrote the widely-referred-to tweet last night (claiming to "have recreated & lab/field tested CVE-2026-109618 / CVE-2026-109619") followed up a couple hours later and said that their POC had not been proven to work "in the wild"

[0] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112703096443097263

[1] https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137

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The whole post looked to be vibecoded and the code did not even match the claims
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As far as i know they lied and are now retracting their claims. What they posted was not consistent with the details of the real bug.
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Cloudflare's blog post announcing its updated WAF rules directly implies the existence of in-the-wild exploits: https://blog.cloudflare.com/php-vulnerabilities-waf-protecti...

"Cloudflare successfully deployed multiple mitigations for all its customers while the vulnerability was leaked before the official release date and we observed attack traffic targeting our customers."

If that's not an in-the-wild exploit, it literally couldn't have been further away than one or two more iterations.

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Attack traffic doesn’t necessarily mean the attacks were, or would have, succeeded.

From Cloudflare’s perspective, there is no downside to saying what they observed, and deploying defenses.

We may never know if this was actually being successfully exploited prior to patch availability.

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You shouldn't wait until the attacks succeed to start deploying defenses.
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That sounds like cloudflare trying to reassure paranoid customers. I think its a reach to go from that statement to actual in the wild exploits.
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Chainguard most likely interpreted Calif's dancing anime girl video as a script kiddie who had found a POC.
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Can you blame them? Calif's unbelievably unprofessional video's leak definitely spikes the cortisol of any actual professional.
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It sounds like there was no "co-ordination" behind any of this co-ordinated disclosure. You'd have expected there to be an IRC channel, a mailing list, a Slack chat, or something for something of this scale.

Was there even an incident co-ordinator here? Was any of the parties talking to each other?

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And then decided to not ask the PHP foundation about it?
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Many people actively following would have 403'ed multiparts so people seeing those blocked might have assumed it started being exploited early instead of probes / background noise.
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This single-handedly assures that I will never, ever do business with Chainguard or any member of its C-suite executive team.
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if their comment in true (linked in sibling comments), then it's really not damning. typically an embargo is ended when someone leaks early or it's being exploited in the wild.

so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.

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If they're gonna unilaterally release an exploit patch 6 hours before an agreed upon embargo for a CVSS 9.2 that affects like ~70% of the internet then they better have reams of evidence showing this was being exploited in a widespread manner and not just "we saw a dancing anime girl edit of a theoretical exploit on twitter, so we had to release it to the world"
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And evidence they at least gave a heads up to everyone in on the embargo, eg "I have to release you all have 1 hour to get on board".

There is a MASSIVE difference between a small number of people exploiting in the wild, and a few hours after a release a bazillion script kiddies doing so. The move to release and break an embargo was childish, absurd, self-serving, and lacking in all common sense. Not to mention, breaking trust.

I agree with those in this thread who say, never going to do business with them. Ever.

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> Not to mention, breaking trust.

I highly doubt their paying customers feel the same way

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Maybe, but if I was maintaining PHP or another critical software, I’d think twice about letting Chainguard have inside information.

I would let Chainguard deal with the patches post official release like all other unreliable parties.

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A weird take.

As a customer, I'd immediately assume no one in the security community would trust them again, and seek someone else to give my money to. Why pay a) an untrustworthy company who b) now is not trusted by anyone and c) won't ever be able to early release again anyhow? And if anything, are left out of important conversations.

Way to burn bridges. You only get to be an asshat once.

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> You only get to be an asshat once.

I have seen no evidence to back up this claim. Quite the contrary actually.

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> You only get to be an asshat once.

TIL observing an exploit in the wild, after the details leaked during the embargo and pushing a fix for your customer is "being an asshat".

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It's the age of LLMs. Exploits go from theoretical to real fairly quickly. PHP's open source, it's not impossible to conceive of someone seeing that video, getting the general idea of what to do, and working the rest out with a decent model.
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There were signs that others broke the embargo too. Public (this one video everyone is talking about), but maybe also non-public. There were some rumors going around which part of PHP was affected. That was enough for some people to figure out the vulnerability.

But it's also possible, that some attackers got non-public inside information.

If the embargo is already broken in a meaningful way, it suddenly becomes much less clear if it is still in place after all. Emphasis on >less clear<.

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Brain rot is making us incompetent, dangerously impatient, or a mixture of both.
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Not sure if this [1] comment is from them?

Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50176735

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So if I'm understanding correctly:

1. There was a leak of the pre-announcement

2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral

3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild

[Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead

4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early

5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown

Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.

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> 3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild

I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.

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Which seems to be someone bullshitting with AI and had nothing to do with the exploit in question.
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That same user wrote a followup tweet last night asserting that their POC wasn't ready to do an exploit in the wild https://x.com/J4ck3LSyN/status/2112753673235501137
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Or maybe the anime girl video was an edit someone else made on top of an otherwise normal Calif video.

Still not great though.

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Unbelievably the anime girl video was the official version from Calif.

https://calif.io/php2shell/#php-5-4-0-rce

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The video got taken down by a copyright claim from Sony Music Entertainment. Unthinkable levels of unprofessionalism by Calif.
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Not really sure if 3 is correct. Might have been Calif leaks the video -> it goes viral -> people make PoCs based on the video -> Chainguard releases the binary because there seem to be credible PoCs out there (that are not just the Shigure Ui video).
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