Threat actors have been observed using agentic artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for post-exploitation activity following the abuse of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619.

"In one case, the attackers targeted a government entity in Europe and within two hours of the initial exploitation they had successfully accessed password hashes and multi-factor authentication secrets," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said.

"They also established an NT LAN Manager (NTLM)-relay tunnel into Active Directory and attempted Domain Admin privilege escalation."

The network security company said it also observed the unknown attacker enumerating the compromised endpoint, with commands and behavioral markers suggesting the work of an agentic attacker. These include commands to facilitate -

Reconnaissance of the authentication database with stolen credentials, targeting password hashes and two-factor authentication (2FA) secrets.

Active Directory (AD) reconnaissance via curl-based anonymous LDAP queries to the domain controller (DC) in an attempt to look for the administrator account.

Reconnaissance of the host to hunt for DNS/AD integration, internal hosts, privileged groups, and interactive users.

"Each command batch is wrapped in section-header delimiters, such as ==SHELLUSER== and ==PASSWD==," it added. "These delimiters produce machine-parseable output for an AI model to read."

The disclosure comes as CYFIRMA said it uncovered a suspected North Korea-linked campaign employing PHP2Shell to actively probe global PHP infrastructure from 21 compromised nodes.

"The scanning is deliberately low-volume and paced," Kumar Ritesh, CEO and founder of CYFIRMA, told The Hacker News.

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