php2shell Exploit Attempts Climb Into the Millions
Day 8 · October 23, 2026 · Singularity Watcher · View on X
Security: The php2shell crisis widened. Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince reported thousands of exploit attempts across its network in the 10 hours before disclosure, tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions since [1]. Anthropic’s chief information security officer Jason Clinton wrote that things “are going to get a lot worse before they get better” and that “we need to hold on for ~18 months” [2]. Vercel said a survey of more than 1,000 SaaS vendors found only 8.4% support secure authentication and called for retiring long-lived static credentials [3]. Charlie Marsh advised upgrading Node or Bun because older versions still accept the eMudhra certificate [4], and Bun v1.4.4 shipped security fixes for Brotli, TLS certificates, and HTTP/3 [5]. Astrohacker wrote that the vulnerabilities had been there all along, are being found now because of superintelligence, and are being fixed with it too [6].
AI research: Q Labs reported pretraining a transformer without backpropagation, cutting the time to a fixed validation-loss target from 1.76 hours to 1.6 seconds in 10 days, about a 4,000x speedup [7]. A widely shared post reported that Anthropic said Claude wrote about one billion lines of formal proofs, about 180 million of them machine-checked across 123 open-source libraries [8]. Demis Hassabis said today’s AI will look like nothing compared to what arrives in one to two years [9].
Agents and industry: Grok Bot can now use a 1Password account [10] and phone apps including Calendar, Reminders, and Contacts on iOS and Android [11]. Grok for Startups launched with one credit balance across Grok, Grok Build, Grok Bot, and the API [12]. Andrew Curran reported that “The Whale has raised another $15 billion” [13]. Sawyer Merritt reported that SpaceX’s board formed a special committee to evaluate a potential combination with Tesla, with no determination made [14].
We’re living in it.
Sources: [1] https://x.com/eastdakota/status/2113079352682570051 [2] https://x.com/JasonDClinton/status/2113325263157395456 [3] https://x.com/vercel/status/2113397272943976560 [4] https://x.com/charliermarsh/status/2113346247759204435 [5] https://x.com/bunjavascript/status/2113213103660032209 [6] https://x.com/AstrohackerLabs/status/2113399974436442542 [7] https://x.com/choblin29/status/2113379379174924581 [8] https://x.com/choblin29/status/2113399409677381694 [9] https://x.com/VraserX/status/2113155577744417195 [10] https://x.com/bot/status/2113332983226831339 [11] https://x.com/bot/status/2113393684209176718 [12] https://x.com/thecsguy/status/2113388677707571686 [13] https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2113101606363484199 [14] https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2113367305539244112