I'm actually somewhat surprised at the clumsiness here.
I'm a complete amateur that had DeepSeek build a PHP2Shell exploit, and once the stealmybitcoin site went up and set an upload limit, i had DeepSeek try to shrink/amplify it.
DeepSeek couldn't find anything but a 2x reduction, but reading the report of how it was done - https://github.com/KillaBoi/StealMyBitcoin-PoC - I was somewhat surprised it didn't find it, and equally horrified at PHP allowing such a memory bomb of creating nested objects by parsing `f[0][x][x]...` from random requests.
Point being; these aren't amateurs but i kind of expect most well funded pros to have found this method to avoid sending massive filenames and session progress data.
Just for context, that is the type of evil we're talking about here.
A German comedian made an episode about it [1]
I am very curious to hear why you thought it was overblown.
There was also that other guy who posted "steal my bitcoin" on a vulnerable PHP server with the private keys to prove it was overblown, and got his bitcoin stolen within a day.
19 hours: https://stealmybitcoin.com/
Part of the confusion is that the initial PR for the release made it sound like there was a ready-to-go exploit that was just push button, get shell on any PHP server in the world. That turned out not to be the case, as evidenced by the fact that the number was 19 hours and not 19 minutes.
But the fact that it was 19 hours and not "never" also does provide a data point that everything that was vulnerable really was vulnerable, it just may not have been quite as vulnerable as it was initially presented. Still plenty vulnerable, of course.
My point here being that the initial 24 hours were very confusing and I think it's worth remembering that and giving people grace for it. Even now, I've heard rumors of an exploit that does work on all boxes without making changes for a specific target but I'm not actually sure whether that exists or not. (Any further info welcome.)
I don't see what was confusing about the initial 24 hours. GP was correct, the description of the bug made it clear it was a very high risk.
It could be overblown if it's not true. The amount of time it took for anyone to claim the Bitcoin from the supposedly-vulnerable PHP site convinced a lot of people that the vulnerability was not as bad as claimed.
This was not a scary vuln at all.
Not having made the claim (took down my website too), but because PHP is not connected directly to the network. While you cannot prevent PHP from being overtaken from inside the PHP program, you can prevent PHP being executed on malicious data by configuring the webserver. It's overblown in the sense that it would be even more serious if the same happened in the webserver itself.
The whole thing was basically a psyop, whether intential or not idk but Califs research was funded in part by OpenAI so there's that.
It was OpenAI's marketing that hyped up the vulnerability to the point that guys on my hockey team saw it in the news and were asking about it. There doesn't need to be mainstream articles about it, these kinds of vulnerabilities happen every year. Just patch and move on.
Mainly saw the severity in the economic impact of having to quickly patch so much, but taking offline being the right choice given the risk, along with of course all the decades old, never patches, blogs being botnet targets someday in the future, akin to Wordpress being commonly used for Ransomware hosting for similar reasons. And of course hopefully learning something from the timeline and leak for future disclosures. Feel things need to generally change from the status quo, barely has changed since the 2015 Google/MSFT squabble...
We need more of this.