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Dream finds an AI-assisted PHP2Shell campaign that rooted 25 servers, including US government systems
See how this story connectsDream, an Israeli cybersecurity company, said on 26 October that on 25 October its researchers found the artifacts of a suspected Chinese campaign that chained a custom PHP2Shell exploit (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) with the Fragnesia Linux kernel flaw (CVE-2026-46300) to root firewalls of one large vendor in a single request. The attacker found about 19,000 exposed firewalls through the Chinese search engine FOFA, filtered them to 240 in the United States, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and rooted 25 servers, then moved on three in a US government-affiliated environment and reached its Active Directory. Claude Code was installed on the attack infrastructure, and an offensive platform called aiscan was set up with DeepSeek and Kimi models. Dream found no direct evidence that AI wrote the exploit, but says the style of about 40 scripts suggests AI-assisted development. Dream has not named the vendor and says it notified it.
Why it matters
Dream says the attacker kept a tunnel into the US government organisation and left web shells on 22 other rooted firewalls, with 19,000 fingerprinted targets to return to.
- When
- 26 Oct 2026
- ID
WTA-N-2026-0481- Where
- International
- Who
- Dream, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, PHP Foundation
- Topics
- Cybersecurity, AI incidents, AI agents
- System
- Claude Code and the aiscan platform with DeepSeek and Kimi models found on the attack infrastructure
- Operator
- suspected Chinese attacker
- Type
- firewalls rooted through PHP2Shell and the Fragnesia kernel flaw: 25 servers in the US, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, Active Directory access at a US government-affiliated organisation
- Status
- disclosed 26 Oct 2026; vendor notified; disclosed by Dream · Incident ledger
Summary written with AI by wheresthe.ai, from Dream and the reporting credited above. Checked against the source on 28 Oct 2026.
Source copy: saved on 28 Oct 2026 to check this story and not republished, because the text belongs to its publisher. Also held by the Internet Archive.
Cite this story
WTA-N-2026-0481: “Dream finds an AI-assisted PHP2Shell campaign that rooted 25 servers, including US government systems.” wheresthe.ai, 26 Oct 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/intl-dream-chained-php2shell-exploit-roots-25-servers-2026-10/ (source: Dream).
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