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Sysadmin Rants About PHP Patch

A sysadmin recounts a 6:12 AM call to patch PHP servers, finding inventory wildly mismatched with reality.

First on the board Oct 22, 13:29 · How the board is ranked

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Key points

Security called @IT_unhinged at 6:12 AM to demand immediate patching of every PHP server due to two critical vulnerabilities allowing remote code execution with no authentication required.
Inventory listed 12 PHP servers, but the actual count included one running WordPress, three running old internal tools, one under someone's desk, two inside vendor appliances, a forgotten 2016 employee directory, and a server named PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH that runs payroll exports.
A PHP 5.6 box's documentation listed its owner as BRIAN, who left in 2019 and said "Oh wow, that's still running?" when called.
At 9:17 someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline, but marketing refused because its campaign was live, and for the next hour the company prioritized a landing page for 20% off webinar registration.

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Original post

Derek Devicemanager @IT_unhinged 19.6K followersOct 22, 00:41

Security called me at 6:12 AM today. "Patch every PHP server immediately." I asked what happened. "Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required." Cool. How many PHP servers do we have? According to inventory: 12 According to reality: Nobody knows. We found one running WordPress. Three running old internal tools. One under someone's desk. Two inside vendor appliances. A forgotten employee directory from 2016. And a server named: PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH Naturally, that one runs payroll exports. Then we found a PHP 5.6 box. I asked who owned it. The documentation said: BRIAN. Brian left in 2019. We called Brian. He said: "Oh wow, that's still running?" Excellent. By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call. CEO: "Can hackers actually get in?" Security: "Potentially yes." CEO: "Without a password?" Security: "Yes." CEO: "Then why do WE need passwords?" Not the lesson. Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue. Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers. Finance asked for a cost comparison. At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline. Marketing refused. "Our campaign is live." So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover. We finally patched everything we could find. Then our scanner discovered another PHP server. Hostname: TEMP-PHP-2014 Uptime: 4,512 days. Nobody knows what it does. Nobody owns it. Nobody can shut it down. But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels. Security has classified it as critical infrastructure. It is running PHP 5.4. The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees. The emergency patch took four hours. Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven. The internet isn't held together with code. It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.

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Reaction on X: Replies largely treated the incident as darkly funny validation of workplace dysfunction. Several commenters added their own examples, such as TEMP-PHP-2014 that can't be shut down because the warehouse stops printing shipping labels, and one noted most businesses run on duct tape and prayers because leadership never wants to update anything.

From @monica_graham, @logicalradical, @dabitch and others. Spam removed, with English and Chinese translations.

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