Vulnerability / Network Security

Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday warned that threat actors are exploiting the recently patched PHP2Shell vulnerabilities against publicly-accessible management interfaces.

"Active exploitation has been observed targeting the Palo Alto Networks management interface exposed to the internet," the network security company said in an update to its advisory.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), allow attackers to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on systems running affected versions of PHP. The issues were patched upstream by the PHP Foundation on October 21, 2026, in versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

The development comes days after Israeli cybersecurity company Dream said it observed a suspected China-nexus threat actor weaponizing the flaws in conjunction with a local privilege escalation bug in the Linux kernel, tracked as Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300, CVSS score: 7.8), to root 25 servers across the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

Among those were three systems belonging to a U.S. government-affiliated environment.

"The affected devices run specific versions of a large vendor's firewall software," Dream noted. "The attacker then launched attacks against Active Directory. The recovered artifacts confirm credential extraction and directory enumeration."

Although Dream did not disclose the name of the affected firewall vendor, the timing of the advisory, combined with the fact that other network security companies have not reported malicious exploitation against their products, suggests that these events may be related.

The Hacker News has contacted both Dream and Palo Alto Networks for comment, and we will update the story if we hear back.

The development has prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add CVE-2026-46300 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by October 31, 2026.

"This vulnerability can be chained with CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 to implant PHP web shells and run commands as root," CISA said.

Palo Alto Networks has also noted that no special configuration is required to be affected by this issue, adding the risk is highest on PAN-OS when access to the management interface is allowed from external IP addresses on the internet.

"This issue strictly affects the management web interface, which includes the HTTPS web UI and XML API service," it said. "It affects the dataplane interface only if a management profile is attached to it."

The following versions of PAN-OS are impacted by PHP2Shell -

• PAN-OS 12.2
  • < 12.2.4-h1 (Fixed in >= 12.2.4-h1)
• PAN-OS 12.1
  • < 12.1.4-h13 (Fixed in >= 12.1.4-h13) (ETA: 10/29)
  • < 12.1.7-h11 (Fixed in >= 12.1.7-h11)
  • < 12.1.10-h3 (Fixed in >= 12.1.10-h3) (ETA: 10/30)
• PAN-OS 11.2
  • < 11.2.4-h23 (Fixed in >= 11.2.4-h23) (ETA: 10/30)
  • < 11.2.7-h23 (Fixed in >= 11.2.7-h23)
  • < 11.2.10-h16 (Fixed in >= 11.2.10-h16)
  • < 11.2.13-h4 (Fixed in >= 11.2.13-h4)
  • < 11.2.16-h1 (Fixed in >= 11.2.16-h1)
• PAN-OS 11.1
  • < 11.1.4-h38 (Fixed in >= 11.1.4-h38)
  • < 11.1.6-h40 (Fixed in >= 11.1.6-h40)
  • < 11.1.7-h12 (Fixed in >= 11.1.7-h12) (ETA: 10/30)
  • < 11.1.10-h36 (Fixed in >= 11.1.10-h36)
  • < 11.1.13-h16 (Fixed in >= 11.1.13-h16)
  • < 11.1.16-h4 (Fixed in >= 11.1.16-h4)
• PAN-OS 10.2
  • < 10.2.7-h39 (Fixed in >= 10.2.7-h39) (ETA: 10/30)
  • < 10.2.10-h42 (Fixed in >= 10.2.10-h42) (ETA: 10/29)
  • < 10.2.13-h27 (Fixed in >= 10.2.13-h27)
  • < 10.2.16-h12 (Fixed in >= 10.2.16-h12)
  • < 10.2.18-h13 (Fixed in >= 10.2.18-h13)

For PAN-OS versions where fix versions are not yet available, Palo Alto Networks has recommended the following mitigations -

• Route incoming traffic for the MGT port through a DP port, e.g., enabling management profile on a DP interface for management access.
• Replace the Certificate for Inbound Traffic Management.
• Decrypt inbound traffic to the management interface so the firewall can inspect it.
• Enable threat prevention on the inbound traffic to management services.

"Customers with Frontier Virtual Patching (ATP Plus) on PAN-OS 12.2.4 and later versions received advance coverage, released via Threat ID 543004, which was released at 10:21 PM PT on October 20," it said.

"The security risk posed by this issue on PAN-OS and Panorama is minimized by restricting access to the management interface to only trusted internal IP addresses according to our recommended best practice deployment guidelines."

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