Hyper Text Processor shortly known as PHP is a general purpose programming language which is designed for Web Development and was created by Rasmus Lerdorf. It is also used in popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, as well as more sophisticated web applications, like Facebook etc, hence it’s a hectic work if anyone identifies a security vulnerability in these kind of platforms.
A Russia-based security researcher Emil Neex Lerner ,disclosed in PHP7 that a remote – code execution vulnerability is found, in the latest version of the hugely popular web development language. CVE-ID of 2019-11043 this type of codes have been involved in this vulnerability, a hacker could easily access a remote web server to execute their own arbitrary code by accessing a URL and hacker would simply just needs to add (?a=) to the website address, followed by their own set of codes. These kinds of attacks drastically lowers the barrier to entry for hacking a website and there by simplifying it to the point where even a non-technical user could easily trap it.
Fortunately, this vulnerability will have an impact on the servers using the NGINX web server with PHP-FPM Extension and this type PHP version is a cloned version of FastCGI and it has few more extra features which are especially designed for websites with heavy traffic. Website owners who are unable to update their PHP they can install and mitigate the problem by setting a new rule within the standard PHP mod_security firewall and by following few set of Instructions .
This kind of vulnerability has all the hallmarks of a security perfect storm. It will lead to multiple environments at risk, but it also makes simple for a hacker to exploit the vulnerability. And there are many strong evidences to suggest that hackers are already exploiting this critical PHP issue and making the users scape-goat for this kind of vulnerability. So we need to make things better before they can be going to be worse.
