It used the development server in PHP, and did not even run requests with fpm or mod_php. Instead, it used the built in dev server of PHP, and just proxied requests from nginx to the php dev server.
Literally the first thing on top of the PHP docs about the dev server used here is this: "Warning This web server is designed to aid application development. It may also be useful for testing purposes or for application demonstrations that are run in controlled environments. It is not intended to be a full-featured web server. It should not be used on a public network."
That is not something people do, and it also explains why the site was down all the time, cause the dev server is super slow, as it's not meant for this in any way shape or form. A real setup would add a few zeros to the requests per second a server could handle.
So all in all, this was very pointless, as it was nothing like real php sites. A shame, cause a realistic setup woild be more interesting and relevant to answer the question of how hard is it really to gain RCE on a normal site.
OP confirmed that the server was initially serving only an index.html. In that configuration, the vulnerable code path is never reached — it requires a .php file.
OP added php-version.php roughly 18–19 hours into the experiment (I'm not sure of the exact timing), so that period should be subtracted from the publicly displayed challenge duration.I'm skeptical of the value of such setups, unless it's clear it's an out of the box setup, and we already know those are totally broken.
I don't understand who these people think they are really fooling. Is this some AI denial?
At first glance, this wouldn't affect demonstration of the vuln.
Namely that the vulnerability was not that easy to exploit, meaning that the myriads of servers that stayed unpatched during those initial days are probably not all members of botnets now. (Contrary to what the discourse might have made it seem like.)
The fact that people are still in denial over this is crazy.
It wasn’t that difficult of an exploit, to be honest. I myself am not the leetest of the leet but I was most of the way there, having been set back by the downtime and my time zone. It’s definitely a fiddly, tricky exploit as most memory exploits are but I think the initial alarm was justified.
While waiting for the server to come back up, it took me about 3 hours with LLM assistance to write a php2shell RCE for nginx and mediawiki on the same version of php as TFA.
The biggest win, as others have also observe, was the demonstration that there aren’t swarms of automated pwnbots out there that will insta-root your server.
Considering the amount of downtime, I think that flag got got pretty quickly.
Ok but a mediawiki page is obviously not comparable
People were complaining that originally it was just using php to serve a static index.html file
It looks like after 18-19hours they updated it to serve a real .php file and it was hacked less than 2 hours after that
Apparently the wallet key wasn't on the server, like some in the original thread suspected, but perhaps not due to maliciousness after all.
In retrospect, I should have just given it a /goal and let it run overnight.