Recently Exposed PHP Hole's Official Fix Ineffective
wiredmikey writes "On Wednesday, a remote code execution vulnerability in PHP was accidentally exposed to the Web, prompting fears that it may be used to target vulnerable websites on a massive scale. The bug itself was traced back to 2004, and came to light during a recent CTF competition. 'When PHP is used in a CGI-based setup (such as Apache's mod_cgid), the php-cgi receives a processed query string parameter as command line arguments which allows command-line switches, such as -s, -d or -c to be passed to the php-cgi binary, which can be exploited to disclose source code and obtain arbitrary code execution,' a CERT advisory explains. PHP developers pushed a fix for the flaw, resulting in the release of PHP 5.3.12 and 5.4.2, but as it turns out it didn't actually remove the vulnerability."
Out of interest, what does the "great track record" refer to? The security has historically been consistently horrific, the performance has historically been consistently horrific, the consistency of the language has been consistently horrific, the development of the language has been consistently horrific...
I do miss the documentation, now that was awesome. But I don't miss the rest of it.