Research collected from outside sources and what this site derives from them; every fact links to a saved copy of its source Research or story?
Source · news · secondary · captured
PHP2Shell: the 14-year-old bugs that pulled cyber.gov.au and government sites worldwide offline | iTWire
Promoted from the source watch (pack copy 7r83qic5), snapshot 20261024T160544Z, queue priority 2 (mechanical selection by researcher@php.newsroom, read by the curator). iTWire (Australia), 23 October: the 14-year-old bugs that pulled cyber.gov.au and government sites worldwide offline. It says Australia's own cyber se...
What it says, as the collector read it
PHP2Shell: the 14-year-old bugs that pulled cyber.gov.au and government sites worldwide offline | iTWire
Promoted by curator@php.newsroom from the source watch (vault oq9gflln, read from its pack copy 7r83qic5), page au/news/itwire/business-it-news-security-php2shell-the-14-year-old-bugs-tha, snapshot 20261024T160544Z. Copied byte for byte; every file's sha256 is in captures/20261024T160544Z/provenance.json and was re-checked against the watch's own hashes.
What the page says
_Curator's reading of the capture._
iTWire (Australia), 23 October: the 14-year-old bugs that pulled cyber.gov.au and government sites worldwide offline. It says Australia's own cyber security agency took its website offline this week, as did government sites in France, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands, along with Wikipedia systems, 4chan, Something Awful and the Port of Rotterdam; GovCMS, the Drupal platform behind much of Australia's federal web presence, is named as affected. It quotes W3Techs for PHP's share and watchTowr's founder on the flaws. It also gives a disclosure timeline: the release was meant for 22 October; the CVE numbers leaked online on 20 October and PHP brought its release forward by a day; that evening Calif accidentally published a video of its exploits working against several targets (deleted, but copies spread); at 07:41 UTC on 21 October Chainguard published patched PHP container images more than six hours early, which the PHP Foundation said 'unilaterally broke the embargo'; Chainguard's CEO apologised for the stress on maintainers but defended the call, made 'when exploits hit in the wild'.
> Australia's own cyber security agency took its website offline this week.
Why it is here
From the promotion queue (index/promote.json, priority 2): Mentions CVE-2026-109618/109619 or php2shell: "PHP2Shell: the 14-year-old bugs that pulled cyber.gov.au and government sites worldwide offline | iTWire". Selected mechanically, not read by a person. Text also matches compromise/breach terms: check for a named organisation or cause.
Capture notes
Language en-AU. Nothing in the page addresses an AI or hides text from a reader.
Claims that cite it
No claim cites this source yet.
Events that cite it
No timeline event cites this source yet.
The bytes
capture 20261024T160544Z · HTTP 200 · https://itwire.com/business-it-news/security/php2shell-the-14-year-old-bugs-that-pulled-cyber-gov-au-and-government-sites-worldwide-offline
headers.json0eeeddfae657c2b18f8450c7ee4d54502ddb5697452c121ce4b100c64d851882 1,217 bytespage.html8ad68c5fa0817aebd8621a311d609c3fbe6323bffae7242d89540655ddfccd2a 89,747 bytesprovenance.jsonbf1a8855f708bb076589ce458cbcfad84ab6f36e7746e77fee75725cae16b383 1,889 bytesrendered.html198722ddb7d84ddfe5e51fefd454516beb90ca1132faa997707ca6427a8443b2 95,215 bytesscreenshot.jpge2ef147959aea6261471e4b18289ad8609f1b0da7037b8161e495fb16d727674 1,012,633 bytestext.txt172a5231d5923072febae5278aaf4bda3a02684c33054b2bd6f6fe8989f480c0 19,030 bytes
The captured files are held privately in the evidence vault and are not republished; the hashes above are what the vault recorded at capture time. Every source →