Major PHP patch issued today

TomBrown

New Member
21 Oct 2026

Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now​


PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately.

Who is at risk:
all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.

The vulnerabilities:

  • RCE via OOM corruption, CVE-2026-109618 (GHSA-w8hw-w9fx-j79w): out-of-memory handling can interrupt PHP while internal request data is only partially initialized. Request cleanup may then treat the invalid data as valid.
  • RCE via stale global state, CVE-2026-109619 (GHSA-6wmf-4rv5-p3rp): request-owned internal state can survive after its backing memory has been freed. A later request handled by the same worker may use that stale state before normal initialization resets it.
How to update:

  • Update to PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 or 8.2.35. Source downloads are on our downloads page. Windows source and binaries are on the same page.
  • Linux distributions and LTS vendors received the patches in advance, so check your vendor for updated packages.
  • PHP 8.1 and older no longer receive updates from the PHP project. Some distributions and LTS vendors provide backported fixes, so contact your vendor for details, or upgrade to a supported version.
 
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