Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Replying to @matthew_d_green @OpenSSLFact
What I’m seeing right now is a lot of people thinking in “before” terms, when they need to be thinking in terms of “after”. What happens when everyone else is panicking too? What does the next Core Infrastructure Initiative look like?
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Replying to @matthew_d_green @OpenSSLFact
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a distinct “before” and “after” when it comes to events. Things that were inconceivable prior to an event can become obvious after. But it’s important to think about what should be obvious *before* important people are panicking.
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
People think that attacking independent women gives them status.
It doesn't give you status, it reveals that you don't have it - and depend on lowering others to fake it
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Our demo shows PHP2Shell giving a shell on MediaWiki, Symfony, Laravel, and phpBB.
We’ve confirmed exploits work on pre-patch releases of PHP 8.2–8.5. If you haven’t updated, assume attackers can compromise your server, and that exploitation will only get easier.
Update: Our PHP exploit is now production-grade.
* stock php.ini-production, display_errors=off, normal memory_limit, multi-worker, ASLR, under load
* ARM64 + x86-64 targets
* MediaWiki, WordPress, phpBB, Laravel
* Apache/mod_php and nginx/php-fpm -> root
xitter.cf/dguido/status/21131291…
I'm very thankful for CVE identifiers because some of the attempts to brand vulnerabilities are quite cringe.
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Which brings me back to a point I wanted to make about the vulnpocalypse: if someone knowledgeable takes any amount of time and tells you that your code *looks* potentially vulnerable, then fix your code. Don’t sit on your hands til someone smarter finds an exploit.
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Lessons for all the new researchers:
1. Write your own posts. Everyone knows what slop looks like.
2. Don't buy a domain name for a bug. It's 2026.
3. Learn the difference between bugs and architecture risks
4. Get friends. They should tell you your bad ideas suck
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Exploit development is one of the most frustrating components of computer security, not because it’s bad (I am in awe of people who can do it) but because too many vendors make working exploits a requirement for patching things.
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Yep. Because you can't just prompt "find me all the vulnerabilties". Maybe in awhile but we're nowhere near that now.
Skilled researchers, custom harnesses, and other techniques are changing the bug depth game, in addition to bringing down the cost.
wait, PHP was actually scanned by Anthropic’s Claude Mythos earlier this year. they also had access to OpenAI’s Daybreak Red for validating exploits.
the PHP Foundation revealed this JUST yesterday.
keeping frontier cyber models in the hands of a selected few doesn’t seem to be working well for the internet.
thephp.foundation/blog/2026/…
There was no payout because PHP2Shell came out of Patch the Planet (trailofbits.com/patch-the-pl…), a pro bono initiative where we (Trail of Bits, OpenAI, Calif and HackerOne) use AI to audit and secure open source software for free.
If we were paid for every bug from PTP we’d all be driving Lambos by now.
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
as a person who lives with a computer architect, 'yes? how did you think we made the computers so fast?'
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
We’re still testing how exploitable the Node.js/Brotli bug is, but we’ve found that it’s surprisingly hard to tell whether you’re even affected.
So @ToBScottA built a scanner that finds hidden copies of the decoder, even in stripped binaries.
github.com/trailofbits/brotl…
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
Run, do not walk, from any cloud provider who is throwing public shade at Railway (or any other provider). The better your security team is, the more internal pressure you have not to mouth off about security in Q4 2026.
Signing up for Daybreak is easy, and essential for anyone that maintains software for others. Get it here: help.openai.com/en/articles/…
xitter.cf/thsottiaux/status/2113…
Will Tan built it in 1 day with Codex, drawing on ~10 years of system security and vulnerability research (4 @trailofbits).
AI accelerates exploit development. Knowing how to turn a bug into a shell still takes expertise. AI makes that expertise more productive.
Re: the widely circulated blog claiming the PHP bugs aren't easily exploitable: @trailofbits has a working exploit that gets a shell on an unmodified MediaWiki installation.
eliastaylor.com/noexploit/
Scott Arciszewski retweeted
We got a PHP exploit working against MediaWiki, but getting freed memory reused just right takes some tinkering under normal traffic.
LLMs struggle here without an expert's guidance, which may help explain the attempts but no confirmed successes.
Re: the widely circulated blog claiming the PHP bugs aren't easily exploitable: @trailofbits has a working exploit that gets a shell on an unmodified MediaWiki installation.
eliastaylor.com/noexploit/
























