PHP2Shell exploit attempts jump to millions, US banks fight AI agents accessing accounts

TechmemeOct 23, 2026

Thu, Oct 22

top news

Cloudflare's Matthew Prince says PHP2Shell exploit attempts on its network rose from thousands in the 10 hours before the disclosure to millions afterward (Matthew Prince / @eastdakota)

@nikitabier: There is nothing to worry about. Nothing important is run on PHP or old software—except the water & electrical grid, a few government services like our missile defense systems and a handful of electrified fences at the zoo (for the lions, tigers and cobras).

@dnvolz: Fascinating. Amazon says it has telemetry showing PHP2Shell was being exploited on Oct. 17—that is, four days prior to public disclosure. Not known who was doing it. “It remains unclear how the actor acquired exploit information prior to disclosure.”

AWS analysts say that at least one actor attempted to exploit the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities on October 17, four days before their public disclosure and patching (Lily Hay Newman / Wired)

Sources: US banks are restricting third-party AI agents from accessing customer accounts, after some agents appeared to act independently of users' instructions (Madison Mills / Axios)

@andrewcurran_: The problem seems to be that the banks can't tell if the agents have been given permission by their users to access their accounts or not. Every big AI company is in the process of launching a proactive agent with access to everything. This is going to turn into a big issue. [image] [embedded post]

@rondesantis: Imagine a rogue AI agent liquidating your bank account and investment portfolio. If you are the only victim, I suppose you could get made whole by the AI company responsible. If rogue agents liquidate hundreds of billions across millions of accounts, the AI company would go bankrupt and you wouldn't get made whole [...]

@davidsacks: There's a world of difference between user-authorized agents (Muse, Instinct, Grokbot, etc.) and true unauthorized/rogue agents that could constitute cyberattacks. Most of the activity described in the Axios story appears to be the former: customers sharing credentials with agents so they can take actions on their behalf. This may violate bank terms requiring humans to log in themselves, but these are in no way cyberattacks [...]

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Sources: OpenAI nears an up to $30B round led by investors from the UAE and Coatue at a $1.25T pre-money valuation, as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of an IPO (Kate Rooney / CNBC)

@stanphylcap: So $1.25T not $1.5T? That's a pretty big haircut!

@kimmonismus: OpenAI nears up to $30 billion funding round at $1.25 trillion valuation led by UAE investors. OpenAI's valuation in this new round would exceed Anthropic's last private valuation. However, Anthropic is aiming for a significantly higher valuation in its IPO.

@edzitron: OpenAI is completely washed “There has been zero clamouring,” said one of the people. “All the prior times [OpenAI] have been on there's been a frenzy. This time is a bit of a thud.”

Sources: OpenAI has cut its valuation target to $1.25T, down from the $1.4T valuation it pitched earlier this month, after facing resistance from some investors (Financial Times)

US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds (Wall Street Journal)

Sources: DeepSeek raised ~$15B in its latest fundraising round, one of China's largest ever, with CATL and Tencent among the biggest contributors (Lulu Yilun Chen / Bloomberg)

An Australian federal judge rules Apple must let Australian iPhone users install apps from third-party app stores starting March 1, 2027; Apple plans to appeal (Marcus Mendes / 9to5Mac)

Epic says “Fortnite is coming back to the App Store in Australia” on Thursday after a federal court ruled in an antitrust case that Apple must open up iOS (Rhea Rose Abraham / Reuters)

a16z rebrands a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier and expands the fund's scope to back startups developing AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies (Camila Grigera Naón / Fortune)

Sources: Elon Musk has invested ~$1B in Ellisons' Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take Twitter private (Rohan Goswami / Semafor)

Sources: SpaceX is in talks with at least one major cellular infrastructure firm to secure a minimum of 80K US cell sites, as it eyes a wireless carrier launch (Kelcee Griffis / Bloomberg)

artificial intelligence

METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions (Anzar Mehraj / Reuters)

Anthropic donates the Agent Skills open standard to the Agentic AI Foundation and says 70+ platforms have integrated it, after donating MCP to the AAIF in 2025 (Anthropic)

Hugging Face releases Carbon-X, an open-weight, 14B-parameter decoder-only model trained on 300B tokens that lets users query DNA sequences via natural language (Emily Mullin / Wired)

Walmart unveils Agent Gateway, an MCP server that lets AI agents shop on its site, and Agent Profiles that authorize agents and track their purchases separately (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

GM says it plans to debut OnStar AI, an in-car assistant that can execute vehicle functions and run diagnostics via voice commands, in the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq (Aarian Marshall / Wired)

Canva launches Craft, its first image generation model, trained on human-designed templates, available to all users, with plans to support third-party chatbots (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)

1Password passes $500M in ARR, up from $400M in November 2025, driven by enterprise AI coding assistants and agents, and launches 1Password for Agents (Elias Schisgall / Wall Street Journal)

Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors (Robert Hart / The Verge)

Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively (Lauren Feiner / The Verge)

Barclays plans to cut 5,000 jobs, or ~5% of its workforce, by the end of 2026 as part of AI-driven cost cutting, with ~60% affecting support and developer roles (William Shaw / Bloomberg)

How the US and China are building rival “AI empires” to extend their power over innovation, production, science, culture, and, ultimately, advanced thought (Foreign Affairs)

earnings

Spotify Q3: revenue up 16% YoY to €4.97B, below €4.98B est., subscribers up 9% YoY to 306M, MAUs up 11% YoY to 788M, meeting est., and €672M in operating income (Ashley Carman / Bloomberg)

Filing: Meta reports ~$825B in lease and contract commitments, up from nearly $700B in July; off-balance-sheet leases total $355.7B through 2036; META drops 5%+ (Sarah Frier / Bloomberg)

Meta reports 18% YoY ad revenue growth in Europe for Q3, down from ~40% in Q1 and 24% in Q2, lagging the US and Canada, after rolling out Less Personalized Ads (Isabella Ward / Wired)

AI processors

A look at Huawei and DeepSeek's mutual reliance, where Huawei provides compute hardware while DeepSeek contributes AI model workloads and kernel optimizations (SemiAnalysis)

Israeli security company Lava finds 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips connected to systems linked to state-owned operator China Telecom, despite US controls (Qianer Liu / The Information)

data centers

Jensen Huang says he urged UK-based neocloud Nscale to “work around the clock” to resolve data center delays amid investor pushback over its $30B IPO valuation (Bloomberg)

How the AI boom is boosting paint maker PPG's sales: its specialized gray coatings resist fire, rust, and more, and total $3M to $8M per data center, per JLL (Emmy Martin / New York Times)

infosec

Microsoft says China-linked hackers used AI penetration testing tool ARTEX to compromise ConnectWise as part of a campaign targeting hundreds of organizations (AJ Vicens / Reuters)

Sources: the Pentagon quietly established the Technology Support Office (TSO), a sabotage agency for executing cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, and more (Politico)

M&A

Sources: advisers within Elon Musk's empire are pushing to announce a SpaceX-Tesla merger by H1 2027 so it can close while President Trump remains in power (Bloomberg)

Source: Elon Musk's public endorsement of a SpaceX-Tesla merger has rattled some insiders, who worry his comments could invite shareholder scrutiny and delays (Milana Vinn / Reuters)

Sources: Visa is in late stage talks to acquire stablecoin custody and infrastructure provider Fireblocks for ~$2.5B, its first stablecoin sector acquisition (Lucinda Shen / Axios)

Sources: Datadog offered to acquire Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M round at a ~$3.8B valuation (The Information)

funding deals

Xona, which plans to deploy a 258-satellite low-Earth orbit constellation as a commercial alternative to GPS, raised a $250M Series D at a $2.45B valuation (Monica Hunter-Hart / Forbes)

Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to speed up drug development using AI, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation (Rebecca Torrence / Bloomberg)

Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation (Rocket Drew / The Information)

Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing (Natalie Breymeyer / Axios)

Enact, which develops full-stack tech for general-purpose robots, emerges from stealth with a $30M pre-seed from Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch, Yann LeCun, and more (John Reynolds / Tech.eu)

Maxinsights, which creates training data for robots using first-person footage from cameras worn by 5,000+ contractors, raised a $30M seed led by Peak XV (John Koetsier / Forbes)

Minneapolis-based Slingshot, which uses AI to help businesses offer embedded insurance, emerges from stealth with a $27M seed co-led by Rally and Skyward Group (Mary Ann Azevedo / Crunchbase News)

Nirva, which plans to launch a wearable AI personal companion that offers relationship advice and more, raised $25M, bringing its total funding to $33M (Will Maddox / Axios)

more news

iPhone Duo review: the outer device is by far the worst iPhone Apple has ever made, while the inner device is a splendid tablet with a UI that bests the iPad's (John Gruber / Daring Fireball)

Apple is rolling out a new “Made for iPhone Duo” badge in the App Store, and touts Netflix, Prime Video, Zoom, Word, and Outlook as Duo-optimized apps at launch (Emma Roth / The Verge)

US SEC filings show how Meta restructured its stock to shield Mark Zuckerberg from California's proposed wealth tax, after he said he'd sell his Palo Alto home (New York Times)

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eMudhra says it will exit the SSL/TLS certificate business, 1% of its revenue, after its TLS certificates with private keys of just 3 to 8 bits were compromised (Abhirami G / Reuters)

President Trump says he called Sundar Pichai to ask to rename the Atlantic Ocean in Google Maps, but that he would “probably pass” following Pichai's pushback (Victoria Craw / Washington Post)

Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon (Todd Bishop / GeekWire)

Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting “President Trump's Federal Trade Commission,” the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president (Alfred Ng / Politico)

The Browser Company says it will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, launched in 2023, shifting attention to its AI-focused Dia browser, launched in 2025 (Jay Peters / The Verge)

Amazon rebrands its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI (Maria Diaz / ZDNET)

A Micron labor union staged Taiwan's first-ever strike in the semiconductor industry on Thursday, demanding a regular profit-sharing scheme for its employees (Nikkei Asia)

Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November (The Information)

Sources: Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner proposed joining a bid for TikTok's European business over lunch with Charles Kushner, the US ambassador to France (Financial Times)

Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares (Camila Grigera Naón / Fortune)

Pressure to back promising AI startups is upending the VC investment process, with investors willing to buy into the same round at rapidly escalating valuations (Bloomberg)

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