Cloudflare reports millions of PHP2Shell exploit attempts

Within ten hours of the PHP2Shell vulnerability disclosure, Cloudflare’s network faced an aggressive surge in malicious traffic. What began as thousands of probing attempts rapidly escalated into a massive, multi-million attack campaign, forcing the infrastructure provider to scramble against an unprecedented wave of exploitation attempts targeting the newly discovered security flaw.

Corp and Tech·October 22, 2026·reads: 505

Cloudflare reports millions of PHP2Shell exploit attempts

CEO Matthew Prince confirmed the scale of the intrusion, noting that the volume of attacks jumped from thousands to hundreds of thousands in the two hours immediately following the public announcement. By the following night, the total count had reached millions. The rapid transition from initial discovery to widespread exploitation highlights the speed at which threat actors weaponize critical vulnerabilities against global internet infrastructure.