This was partly me. I take responsibility for posting it on HN. I am truly sorry for the disruption this has likely caused.
My contact had informed me there was no embargo, and told me her contact had told her the same. It transpired this morning that was a lie.
>On October 21st at 07:41 UTC, more than six hours before the coordinated release, Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images containing the fix. Like other distributors, Chainguard had received the patch in advance so its users could update the moment the vulnerabilities were disclosed. Any attacker could now study the fix in binary form while every other PHP user was still waiting for the release. This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
On the plus side, at least I'm not Chainguard. Yikes.
This is the most surprising part to me. It sounds like Calif saw the leaks, interpreted that as embargo being broken, and then raced to publish their [anime dancing] marketing video? I'd have expected much better.
You have your source code public, so you can't commit/push because then you've leaked info.
Your build pipeline is also likely public, so you can't just build from another source code... source.
You can create a private repo, but now you also need to build a private build system.
You don't get the same generous build resources for private repos, so you either:
a) simplify the build to just the essentials
b) pay
Unless you have significant funding, you'll probably go for a).
Now you have to maintain two systems, also with some differences between them.
Plus you need a way to get the build artifacts from the private system to the public one, typically at a fixed point in time.
Any failure/delay (e.g. less powerful build on private repo, errors because you exercise it rarely) causes people to get upset that you didn't respect the announced time.
Maybe you're also using things like image attestation, another can of worms.
This is incredibly damming of Chainguard. I struggle to see justification for this, even with the chaos approaching the coordinated release.
In their place I would worry that this was the last time anyone shared an embargoed build with them.
Very irresponsible behaviour in my opinion; and if it's a decision made unilaterally by their CEO, probably a breach of their SOC 2 certification. What's next? "$X isn't patching this CVE fast enough, here's a binary blob of our fix, don't worry, we're making this free!"
That can be for marketing purposes or by mistake. Not sure how to deal with that.
PHP2Shell: AI uncovers critical RCE in PHP
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180836
Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover critical vulnerabilities
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50181175
Upcoming critical PHP security release (CVE-2026-109618 / -109619)
for legacy systems, how difficult would it be for an attacker assisted by "AI" to stage the conditions
on a scale of 1 (easiest) to 10 (hardest)
>This disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure.
Good. Coordinated disclosure meant that people couldn't protect themselves. That's not a good thing. It meant sites were forced to shut down instead of simply updating.
They didn’t get to unilaterally decide that the embargo was inconvenient and publish early.
Okay, but how close did they get? Were they close enough that a determined actor could've (perhaps using an LLM) managed to get to a functioning exploit?
This is the real story. You ship one of them (the breaking change) with —fuck-my-shit-up or something as a compile time option to switch to the other fix.
> Chainguard unilaterally broke the embargo and published built images ...
Won't be the last time this happens. If there is no consequence of breaking the rules, people will keep doing that.
Being given advance notice of an upcoming security fix is an immense privilege, organisations should turn around quickly when given such information, they shouldn’t be given more than a couple of days to update IMHO, it’s not like the rest of the world can wait.
Because if there are already publicly available exploits seen, it makes no more sense to keep holding patches back just so that OpenAI etc. can get a nice press release
1. There was a leak of the pre-announcement
2. Calif sees leak, goes and releases dancing anime girl video before pulling it, goes viral
3. Chainguard sees dancing anime video, doesn't recognize Calif, and thinks the exploit is in the wild
[Edit 3a]: Or alternatively, Calif's leaked video causes the PoC to be found by others by providing enough of a lead
4. Chainguard releases updated binaries thinking it doesn't matter, causing the real exploit to then be found early
5. Which then causes PHP Foundation to basically have a meltdown
Personally I blame Calif for the unprofessional video which absolutely completely looks like some script kiddie and for being too detailed [edit 2: assuming Calif produced it and the anime wasn't a prank edit]. In this case it wasn't just unprofessional fun but may have literally messed up the responsible disclosure.
Still not great though.
I'm not sure about this part. I saw https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html going around a bit over 12 hours ago, before the chainguard images went out, and plenty of other chatter of exploitation happening in the wild.
so, if they saw evidence of exploits in the wild, it is not unusual at all to release the fix.
Song is Petite Meller - High Forever (Marlon Hoffstadt Remix). Which is annoyingly catchy
thanks.
They're apparently not trustworthy, and behave as children.
They took it down but someone added the anime stuff and reposted it. Totally irresponsible.
Embargos make sense if no one is exploiting it yet, but if its out in the wild, the best path forward is releaseing as soon as possible.
Was there even an incident co-ordinator here? Was any of the parties talking to each other?
cubefox•1h ago