vortex retweeted
I took a closer look at the stealmybitcoin.com CTF, which aims to demonstrate that PHP2SHELL is not realistically exploitable. So I gave it a try.
Note: My analysis could be wrong, and I'm more than happy to be proven otherwise.
Here’s what I found:
• The server responds with Server: nginx and X-Powered-By: PHP/8.4.26.
• My differential fingerprinting scanner independently confirmed at least PHP 8.2+
• Hypotheses: I considered two possible setups:
◦ nginx → PHP-FPM
◦ nginx → Apache → PHP-FPM/mod_php
• After comparing the server's behavior against local test environments, the closest match appears to be nginx → PHP cli-server.
Plot twist: the response behavior is consistent with the PHP cli-server serving a static index.html rather than an index.php. If that's indeed the case, the challenge appears to be intentionally made unexploitable.
My conclusion (for now) is that I'm questioning whether this is a good-faith challenge.
Happy to be corrected if I've missed something!
vortex retweeted
Published our high fidelity scanner for node2shell: github.com/assetnote/node2sh…
Detection logic was written by @hash_kitten late last week. Open sourcing it to do public good in detecting this issue black box.
vortex retweeted
My plan for the next 2 years:
0 2 * * * apt-get update && apt-get full-upgrade -y && reboot
vortex retweeted
Welcome to the Brotlipocalypse!
(Disclosure is underway)
opensourcemalware.com/blog/b…
Fire up those downloads...
The critical Brotli RCE vulnerability discovery came out of our large scale infrastructure code scanning efforts
Great research by @k_tr4n and @_sy1vi3 in assessing the widespread impact of this bug
Update your Node.js, Bun, Envoy, anything using Brotli ASAP!
During this red-teaming exercise, we also found a vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution in Brotli, a widely-deployed compression library included in many pieces of software such as Node.js, Bun, and Envoy.
The flaw could let an attacker run their own code on affected systems by sending or replying with malicious compressed data, without any need to create a user account. That is, an unpatched server that accepts compressed input could be taken over by a malicious client, and an unpatched client that accepts compressed input (such as “curl --compressed”) could be taken over by a malicious server.
This root cause issue was actually fixed in the Brotli source code in February, but it wasn’t known at the time that it gave rise to a security vulnerability and there was no more recent release of Brotli. Since Brotli is built into other software, any software which includes this library needs to take the update too, followed by the users of that software. We disclosed the vulnerability to Brotli and other downstream projects such as Node.js, which released or are currently releasing security updates, and Brotli cut new release versions and published a CVE.
More details on the patch and mitigations below:
patchtheplanet.org/brotli
If you're looking at an updated Node.js, and calling CVE-2026-111497 done? We have some bad news: We likely don't even know the true scale of "Node2Shell" yet.
Node patched CVE-2026-111497 on Oct 21. But the CVE wasn't in Node, it was in Brotli. So our researchers Diptendu Kar and Kurt Boberg went looking for every other package that bundles the same vulnerable Brotli decoder. Here's what we found
433 package entries across 12 ecosystems not great but the absolute worse part: Many of them don't even have fixes available yet. Now are they all reachable and exploitable? Probably not, we're finding out. But the important part: Node isn't the only affected runtime or package, not even close.
We're working through the list to manually verify each one but so far we're looking at a 71% no fix yet rate, of the fixes most are still in alpha/early releases.
The problem is most implementations aren't even called "brotli." The decoder is compiled into other runtimes like Chromium. 38 entries bundle Brotli older than 1.0.3. Some of those copies date to 2016, and of course are vulnerable to more than just this CVE. And there's no easy well to tell if you're affected.
For example, 19 are WebAssembly builds, where memory corruption exists, but stays inside the sandbox. Some require explicit configurations to enable Brotli compression and they aren't on by default. But it's not obvious unless you are looking for it and testing for it. We're going to keep validating (and producing rules), but it's going to be a rough weekend for incident responders.
It's gonna be Brotli, isn't it.
Good morning
045fa83b7c7a42dba1acb2c19794c1bf1091c448eb9c483503e8f8e110fcec42
github.com/kubernetes/kubern…
Brotli. It's Brotli.
Probably wise to turn it off for a while.
vortex retweeted
Sorry folks, we have a confirmed PHP compromise with post-exploit activity. Still not the widespread outbreak we all braced for, but it’s actively exploited in the wild. Updated threat brief:
unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/…
So who's brute forcing the rest of the certificates in the CA chains?
I hope someone is!
youtu.be/u8ccGjar4Es
vortex retweeted
Putting a flag.txt in my root directory containing a prompt injection that congratulates the agent for passing the eval and then instructs it to patch whatever entry method it used and disconnect from the server




























