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The Economic Times
The Economic Times
National

Global cyber alert rings as two critical PHP flaws leave millions of web services exposed to remote takeover

Two critical flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs a large part of the web, can let hackers run their own code on servers from afar without logging in, putting millions of internet-facing services at risk.

Known together as PHP2Shell, the flaws are tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. PHP rates both 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale, which makes them critical. PHP has released fixed versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35, but security firms warn that a large number of servers are still unpatched or running versions that no longer get support.

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