The PHP Foundation said software distributor Chainguard unilaterally broke a coordinated disclosure embargo on Wednesday by publishing container images with fixes for two critical PHP vulnerabilities at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the scheduled 14:00 UTC release. In a postmortem report, the foundation said the early release of patched images for PHP 8.2 through 8.5 allowed potential attackers to analyze the binary fixes while other users were still waiting for updates, adding that the move “disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.”

Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc apologized for the added stress on PHP maintainers and said he made the decision after several vendors in the disclosure group reported exploits in the wild, though the PHP security team said it found no working public exploit by release time. In its postmortem, the PHP Foundation also called its own delay in fixing the underlying memory corruption bug, which was first spotted in a 2024 audit, “a structural failure” and asked companies that rely on PHP to fund more engine engineers.

Separately, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said his platform was hit by cyberattacks shortly after the flaws were disclosed, prompting his team to use Anthropic’s Claude AI to write patches for older PHP versions and local AI models to simulate attacks. The disclosures follow warnings from Amazon Web Services that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 and dubbed PHP2Shell, are now broadly exploited in the wild after its MADPOT network detected pre-disclosure attack attempts from a commercial anonymization network. Rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 scale, the unauthenticated remote code execution flaws affect PHP 5.4 and later across roughly 70% of websites.