10-26-2026 (Monday)
Hello, and welcome to The Intentional Brief - your weekly video update on the one big thing in cybersecurity for middle market companies, their investors, and executive teams.
I’m your host, Shay Colson, Managing Partner at Intentional Cybersecurity, and you can find us online at intentionalcyber.com.
Today is Monday, October 26, 2026.
PHP2Shell: Not The Wakeup Call We Wanted, But Maybe The One We Needed
If you’re watching this show I don’t know how you missed this story in the past week. As a refresher and / or for posterity, I’m talking about what’s now been dubbed PHP2Shell, a newly discovered vulnerability in nearly every version of PHP, a package used in damn near every part of the internet.
The threat was so bad that some sites simply took themselves offline until they could patch, and kudos to the PHP team for putting the patches out rapidly, and continuing to track the issues.
Now, let’s take stock of what this experience showed us and how we can learn from it to get better moving forward.
First, in something that won’t be a surprise to anyone who watches this show regularly, the vulnerability was discovered using AI to support the research. The OpenAI team is credited for discovering the vulnerability, but in fact, some are reporting that a similar vulnerability was previously noted but it was flagged off as “too difficult to exploit.”
For humans, maybe, but clearly not for AI.
So, what does that mean for us? First of all, it means we can’t just ignore all of those lows and mediums that the scans are finding. AI is stringing these together in a way that creates real risk and vulnerability exposure for us.
Secondly, we’re at the very leading edge of this phenomenon - and in fact the Aikido team has a good post up about a whole bunch of other very popular packages that also suffer a similar set of exposures as the PHP bug, including Node, Java, Python, and several Linux distributions.
This means we not only need ways of patching things rapidly, but we also need good visibility into what’s actually running in our environment, down to the software packages and version numbers.
If you’re writing code, you can use the tools available to you in DevOps or Github or BitBucket to accelerate this, but you also need to pull together information from endpoints, operating systems, and cloud environments.
Leverage the native tools as best as you can (e.g. AWS Security Hub, Azure Defender for Cloud) or look for a third party (Wiz, Orca, etc.) to help provide this look.
We need to then act on the information we have - even when it’s incomplete. This doesn’t mean we need to be Chicken Little, and “the sky is falling” rhetoric is never helpful, but it does mean that we need to make our stakeholders in leadership and on the business side aware of what sort of changes we’re making, why, and what it means for them.
AI is going to help us compress processes to the next constraint, whether we’re attackers or defenders. This isn’t the wakeup call we wanted, but it’s the one we needed. Use the tools at your disposal to find and remove those constraints before they’re used against you.
If it ends up that you can make the case but can’t make the change, then maybe you’re not in the right organization - and it’s getting less and less likely that organization will be able to endure the threat environment we’re all heading into.
Plan accordingly.
Fundraising
From a fundraising perspective, we saw more than $21.5B in newly committed capital last week, including:
Blackstone raised $8.7b for its fifth energy transition fund;
Pantheon raised $6b for its eighth PE secondaries fund; and
Ara Partners raised about $2.5b for its first energy projects fund.
Anthropic dropped their S-1 prospectus this morning, so plenty of news coverage about that which I’ll leave to others.
Suffice to say, the numbers are big, and they’re spending more than they’re making. By a lot.
A reminder that you can find links to all the articles we covered below, find back issues of these videos and the written transcripts at intentionalcyber.com.
We’ll see you next week for another edition of the Intentional Brief.
Links
https://therecord.media/php-script-vulnerabilities-warnings
https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-23-1
https://x.com/gdb/status/2112921529650688312
https://www.aikido.dev/blog/python-packages-vulnerable-node2shell-brotli-cve-2026-111497