Ciberseguridadlatam Fragnesia and PHP2Shell Exploit Chain Compromises 25 Firewalls
Article Content
- •Attackers exploited PHP2Shell and Fragnesia to compromise 25 firewalls.
- •CVE-2026-46300 allows privilege escalation from web shell to root access.
- •CISA added both vulnerabilities to its KEV catalog due to active exploitation.
A coordinated attack exploited two vulnerabilities, PHP2Shell and Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300), to compromise 25 PAN-OS firewalls across the US, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. The attack began with PHP2Shell, allowing attackers to deploy a web shell on the firewall management interface. Once the web shell was established, the attackers used Fragnesia to escalate privileges to root access on the affected systems. This escalation was facilitated by a flaw in the Linux kernel, which has a public proof of concept available since May 2026. CISA added both vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, with PHP2Shell being listed on October 26, 2026, and Fragnesia on October 28, 2026. The attack involved sophisticated post-exploitation scripts and targeted systems linked to the US government. Administrators are advised to patch both vulnerabilities to fully mitigate the risk of exploitation.
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China-Linked Hackers Exploit PHP2Shell Vulnerabilities to Breach U.S. Government Systems On October 21, 2026, the PHP development team released patches for two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, known as PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619), which allow unauthenticated remote code execution. These vulnerabilities were actively exploited by a suspected China-linked threat actor who compromised 25… 
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