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Vendor blog says chained PHP firewall exploit rooted 25 servers
Dream Research said on Oct. 26 it found artifacts of a campaign that chained PHP2Shell with a kernel privilege-escalation bug against internet-facing firewalls, including two it described as U.S. government-affiliated.
Security firm Dream Research said it recovered artifacts of a campaign that chained a custom PHP remote-code-execution exploit with a Linux kernel privilege-escalation bug to gain root on internet-facing firewalls, including systems it described as belonging to a U.S. government-affiliated environment1.
In a Oct. 26 blog post, the company said the chain combined what it calls PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) with a kernel bug it calls Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300) in a single unauthenticated HTTP request against specific versions of an unnamed large vendor's firewall software1.
Dream said it is not naming the vendor or versions and that the vendor has been notified1. WhatsNewPaper could not independently verify the victim count, government affiliation, or exploit details from the post alone1.
According to Dream, attackers used the Chinese asset-search service FOFA to find about 19,000 internet-facing management interfaces, fingerprinted about 5,000 live devices, narrowed to 240 targets in the United States, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and successfully rooted 24 firewalls, parking webshells on 22 of them1.
The company said two of those firewalls appeared tied to one U.S. government-affiliated organization, that a first box crashed after exploitation on Oct. 23, and that a second was rooted on Oct. 24, after which operators built reverse SSH tunnels toward domain controllers, VPN gear and other internal hosts and attempted Active Directory follow-on activity whose success Dream said it could not determine1.
Dream listed Chinese-nexus indicators — FOFA, Chinese tunneling tool iox, DeepSeek and Kimi models, UTC+8 clocks, Chinese-language prompts — but said it does not attribute the activity to a named threat actor1. It also said Claude Code and an offensive platform called aiscan were present, without direct proof those tools wrote the exploits1.
The post is a vendor research write-up that also markets Dream's Hero and Sphere products; Hero, it said, was used in the investigation1. Independent government confirmation and a vendor advisory were not in the material reviewed1.
