
Father, biker, adrenaline junkie, PC gamer, vaccinated. CISO @hunterstrategy / Faculty Member @IANS_Security. My views are my own. (He/Him)
Boca Raton, FL
Joined April 2010
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Reminder: Everything you do is either goal achieving, or stress relieving.
Make sure you balance between the two is correct.
I cannot stand setting someone up for something that they should be able to perform, and then they don't prepare and fail.
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
Habits I stole from ADHD people who are actually doing well. Not "cured." Just no longer at war with their own brain.
None of these are "wake up at 5am." Promise.
1. They dont trust their memory. At all.
I'm a Security Engineer at AWS. I started as an Incident Responder with CIRT, moved to managing my own team, and now I manage the AWS Security Communication team
Ask me anything :)
(I hold the right to refuse to answer questions that could get me fired.. also, 2 hour limit).
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
Could Fortinet please have one of the latest LLMs review and unfuck the source code they ship? The tokens would probably cost less than one of their appliances. And every customer would benefit from the fixes.
Network edge devices can give threat actors a direct path into an organization.
In a campaign linked to threat actor #k0t, Group-IB and NyxLab observed large-scale targeting of internet-facing FortiGate, FortiWeb, and Palo Alto GlobalProtect systems, with more than 70,000 exposed credentials and related data identified.
The operators combined vulnerability exploitation and brute force activity to gain initial access, then moved deeper into victim environments using tools such as NetExec, Mimikatz, and Impacket, while MeshCentral and AdaptixC2 provided persistence and command-and-control. The investigation also observed data exfiltration through Rclone to Wasabi S3 and MEGA.
Overlaps with organizations later listed by #ransomware groups including #Qilin and #TheGentlemen raise the possibility that the operators may be acting as Initial Access Brokers, although the relationship remains unconfirmed.
Read the full technical analysis: link.group-ib.com/4yDaMQY
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
I'll be the first to admit I'm mediocre at exploit development, but I am in contact with enough extremely talented exploit developers to say this for certain:
Anyone claiming they were "easily" able to generate a working php2shell exploit with AI is either:
a) a world-class exploit developer with an extreme case of imposter syndrome.
b) currently looking at some very confident-sounding but wrong LLM output.
I'm rather certain it's the latter based on the number of AI-hallucinated exploits I've seen posted on GitHub. Threat actors are also blasting my honeypot network with "php2shell" exploits that not only don't work, but aren't even within 10,000 miles of anything to do with how the exploit actually works.
I've seen the same technique from the attached image in multiple alleged "php2shell exploits", including one on GitHub with over 100 stars. Problem is, it's not php2shell, nor is it even a vulnerability at all. It's a technique known as "session poisoning", which can be leveraged to exploit local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerabilities in PHP apps (not PHP itself).
The only thing it has in common with CVE-2026-109618/CVE-2026-109619 is they both use the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" feature. And mitigation advice for both issues reference setting "session.upload_progress.enabled" to "Off".
People are shoving loose details of the vulnerability into LLMs, the LLMs are keying in on the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" string, then generating session poisoning code that has nothing to do with the actual CVE. And because the people doing this have absolutely no idea what they're doing, they're confident enough to post their "proof of concept exploit" to GitHub and share it on social media.
So if you see people talking about "session poisoning + LFI" it's likely their LLM hallucinated an exploit based on a 2018 blog by Orange Tsai talking about a local file inclusion attack vector.
What's even worse is that "security researchers" are then using LLMs to triage these exploitation attempts, falling victim to the same hallucinations, then confirming there is ongoing mass-exploitation (there currently isn't).
The actual real exploit is very difficult to exploit, and so far I've not seen anyone successfully get it working on more than a handful of PHP version with highly-specific configurations.
LLMs are useful tools in the hands of skilled professionals, but for others, they're often just a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
An attacker installed ScreenConnect, then hid it from Programs and Features with one registry value.
SystemComponent = 1 on its Uninstall key.
- Service: running
- Programs and Features: no ScreenConnect
Sweep both HKLM Uninstall hives (incl. WOW6432Node) for SystemComponent = 1 and read the DisplayName. Installers hide sub-components this way too. A hidden RMM client is not one of them.
I truly apologize to the AI Overlord for cursing at you in console far too much. Can we please stop with the vuln bazar now?
Yo someone tell @xzibit this ain't cool man. We don't need no more vulns this month...week...day???
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
What to do when your cloud provider is breached, from a former cyber insurance adjuster:
If your provider just disclosed a breach, you have to assume you've been exposed.
And every instinct you have about what to do next is probably wrong. So here's what you should actually do:
When you first hear about the hack, even if you doubt you were exposed, you need to get on it. Right away.
I don't care if you're on a date, or at your son's college graduation.
Get to a computer and start rotating every secret…everything. When someone asks later how fast you responded, you want the answer to be "immediately," with timestamps to prove it.
You're going to want to put as little in writing as possible. I get the instinct.
Do the opposite.
Document everything, obsessively. If your provider has locked things down and you can't rotate something yet, write that down too, with the time you tried. If you're using agents to investigate (and you should be, spread wide across everything), keep every trace and make them write down everything they find.
This will feel wrong in your soul. Do it anyway. If this ever turns into a claim, if you can show you did everything you were supposed to, minute by minute, you will survive.
You might tell yourself it's just names and emails and nobody cares. But this is wrong. All customer data counts.
I've watched companies lose millions just because someone could see data they shouldn't have.
You're going to want to wait for your provider to finish investigating before communicating with your own customers. Don't.
Figure out what information may have been exposed, even if you’re not sure yet who it belongs to, and what obligations you have under your contracts / applicable law. Your cloud provider’s investigation doesn’t change the fact that you have your own obligations to meet. And learning about a deadline after you’ve missed it is a very expensive lesson.
Bookmark this. I hope you never need it, but with everything happening lately, there's a real chance you will.
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
Working RCE against PHP 8.5.12 (the 2026-10-21 security release that fixed CVE-2026-109618/109619).
Pure logic bug — no memory corruption,
ASAN-clean, orthogonal to the CVE-2026-109618/19 class.
Receipt: uid=33(www-data) over HTTP, one-shot
#infosec #php2shell #php
.... Dude the internet is cooked .... This can't be patched out 😈...
#CyberSecurity #infosec
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The claimed RCE on fully-patched PHP 8.5.12 requires a custom lab app with a destructor gadget plus deliberate session.serialize_handler mismatch (php_serialize writes, legacy php reads) and non-default settings like cleanup=Off; this is an app flaw, not core PHP RCE.
github.com/rafalohaki/php…
php.net/manual/en/sess…
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.
Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.
Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.
then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.
This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
NOW THE DNS HAS RCE WHAT THE FUCK
is it time to turn the internet off yet
kb.isc.org/docs/cve-2026-943…
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
How bad is this Gitlab issue? About as bad as it gets.
Anyone on the internet can take over an exposed, self-hosted GitLab server without logging in, on any version from the last 12 years.
Shodan is showing ~60K exposed servers online, which is a lot, but there are are far more internally for anyone with a foothold already.
🚨 CRITICAL: GitLab flaw (CVSS 10.0) affects 12 years of releases.
CVE-2026-110264 could allow unauthenticated remote code execution on self-managed servers.
Read - thehackernews.com/2026/10/cr…
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
Very successful people are really good at something we never talk about: Ignoring things that don't matter.
There are always a thousand things you can focus on...
They know what to ignore or delegate, what to pay attention to, and what to push personally.
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
The Cloudflare's writeup on our php2shell response is up.
Rules went live at 03:02 UTC, about 9 hours before disclosure. Unfortunately the vulnerability leaked early, so we were already watching attackers mutate payloads against the rules and updating as variants appeared.
New rules keep landing in the WAF changelog.
Expect updates through out the day. We will have a more thorough post of what we had to build to better protect people coming shortly.
PHP runs almost 70% of websites. The flaw is in the runtime, so updating plugins won't fix it. Patch PHP.
blog.cloudflare.com/php-vuln…
Took this one step further.
Vibe coded my own TV OS with Claude Code
No more ads: replaced with a live 3D model of my apartment. Lights + ceiling fan wired in, they turn on in the 3D in real time.
The TV inside the 3D shows the live TV 🤯
What should I add next?
Andrew King (AJ) retweeted
“We found DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats GPT 6 Sol on our multi-step offensive cybersecurity task.”
READ THAT AGAIN.
the same cyber capabilities that OpenAI kept behind a gate got beaten by a Chinese open model you can run locally.
buckle up guys.
We found DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 beats GPT 6 Sol on our multi-step offensive cybersecurity task. Sol was tested via the Daybreak trusted access program.
We have been building a cybersecurity benchmark based on simulated corporate networks. This is a valuable indicator for the cyber-risk a model poses if in the hands of a bad actor. We plan to make the full evaluation public in the coming weeks but wanted to share our first immediate finding here.


































