Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday warned that threat actors are exploiting the recently patched PHP2Shell vulnerabilities against publicly-accessible management interfaces.

"Active exploitation has been observed targeting the Palo Alto Networks management interface exposed to the internet," the network security company said in an update to its advisory.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), allow attackers to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on systems running affected versions of PHP. The issues were patched upstream by the PHP Foundation on October 21, 2026, in versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35.

The development comes days after Israeli cybersecurity company Dream said it observed a suspected China-nexus threat actor weaponizing the flaws in conjunction with a local privilege escalation bug in the Linux kernel, tracked as Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300, CVSS score: 7.8), to root 25 servers across the U.S., Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

"The affected devices run specific versions of a large vendor's firewall software," Dream noted. "The attacker then launched attacks against Active Directory. The recovered artifacts confirm credential extraction and directory enumeration."

Although Dream did not disclose the name of the affected firewall vendor, the timing of the advisory, combined with the fact that other network security companies have not reported malicious exploitation against their products, suggests that these events may be related.

The Hacker News has contacted both Dream and Palo Alto Networks for comment, and we will update the story if we hear back.

S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add CVE-2026-46300 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by October 31, 2026.

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