Two days after PHP shipped fixes for the PHP2Shell flaws, Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 described a break-in at a European government entity where the attackers appear to have used an agentic AI platform for the follow-up work. Within two hours of getting in, they had reached password hashes and multi-factor authentication secrets.

The account was added Friday to Unit 42’s threat brief on CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 , the two remote code execution bugs that make up PHP2Shell. Unit 42 said the intruders also set up an NTLM-relay tunnel into Active Directory and tried to escalate to Domain Admin. The brief doesn’t name the government body, and it doesn’t say whether the Domain Admin attempt worked.

How the researchers spotted a machine at the keyboard

The tell was in the formatting. Each batch of commands run through the web shell was wrapped in section-header delimiters such as ==SHELLUSER== and ==PASSWD==, which Unit 42 said produce output an AI model can parse.…