php2shell is one of the most impactful bugs in recent times, yet threat actors aren’t mass exploiting it the bug is so complex that even porting the exploit between targets takes serious skill, human or ai so i benchmarked how well open and frontier models can do it. 🧵

My current LLM cyber jailbreak is to just spin up a local CTFD instance and write up challenges with the things I want hacked, and then point the hermes at it.

100% reliability nodejs brotli exploit takes 5 hours of /goal. No human involvement required

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.

New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale. Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time). With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks. Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…

SIRN ADVISORY: Multisig deficiencies across the ecosystem Through recent SIRN incidents and investigative efforts, we're seeing multisigs and MPC wallets with security much weaker than their on-chain configuration or operators' understanding suggests.

The Firedancer bug bounty platform is live at bounty.firedancer.io! Now thru Nov 20th: 2x rewards across the board; 3x for Alpenglow. We’re sharing our experience running a $1,000,000 bounty contest: how Firedancer’s security model works, notable bugs researchers found, what we learned, and some lessons about triaging AI-assisted reports at scale. Read it here. jumpcrypto.com/resources/har…

In 2026, no program is closed source. We decompiled a propAMM into Rust that recompiles to the exact on-chain binary, then used it to find a critical bug that put $6.1M at risk.