Week of Sunday, October 25, 2026

You may have patched your own websites, or whatever else you built with PHP. Your firewall's management console, the security appliance's admin page, or anything else that arrived with PHP built in is a different matter, because only the company that sold it can fix it, and the biggest vendors had not as of October 22nd. Palo Alto Networks says every version of its firewall software is affected, has no fixed release, and is not aware of malicious exploitation. Cisco has 18 products and 13 cloud services under investigation, lists none as vulnerable or as confirmed safe, and offers no workaround. Fortinet says its main firewall operating system is not affected, but it is still investigating about a dozen other products, and a clear operating system says nothing about the management consoles and add-on products around it. Anything past end of support or end of life most likely will not get a PHP upgrade at all, and neither will a product whose maker no longer exists. Treat those as rip and replace.

The flaws sit in PHP itself, the engine that runs the code behind a website. W3Techs, a web-technology survey, counts it on about 70% of the sites whose server language it can identify. An attacker needs no login, and on a common Apache web-server setup a single crafted request triggers the bug before any of the site's own code runs. Updating WordPress, a plugin or your own application therefore changes nothing. The engine underneath has to be replaced by whoever controls the server software. If your site runs on a hosting plan or a virtual private server, that is the hosting company, and you can update everything you own and still be exposed until it upgrades PHP. When PHP is built into a vendor's product, only the vendor can replace it. PHP 8.1 and older get no official fix.

The flaws were found partly with AI models, and the first exploitation attempt came before the fixes did. Amazon's honeypot network, a set of decoy servers it uses to watch attacks, logged an exploitation attempt on October 17th, four days before the fixes were released, and Amazon does not know how the actor got the information. The flaws' identifiers leaked on October 20th, and Calif, a security firm, accidentally published a demonstration video that day. A related third flaw, disclosed October 23rd, has only a temporary workaround until the next release.

Whether anyone has actually been breached is in dispute. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in an alert last revised October 23rd, says it "has not observed successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild" as of publication. CrowdStrike has seen testing, probing and unsuccessful attempts, and says many public proofs of concept crash the server rather than run code; if a reliable one appears, many actors "will almost certainly" use it. Sansec, an e-commerce security firm, now calls mass exploitation "less likely than we first expected." Against that, Wiz, a cloud security firm, demonstrated code execution on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla website platforms. ELLIO, a security firm, saw a web shell, a backdoor an attacker leaves behind, staged within 81 minutes of a first hit. CrowdStrike's chief executive George Kurtz told CNBC to expect "a lot of breaches happening in the coming months."

Most Linux distributions fixed their packages, but Red Hat, Amazon Linux and SUSE had not as of October 22nd. CISA's guidance is to inventory all PHP, which it notes is often a component of other software, patch internet-facing systems first, and take offline anything that cannot be patched. PHP lists temporary workarounds for server administrators, and a web application firewall, a filter that blocks malicious web traffic, "may provide some protection," in CISA's words, though Sansec says its own cannot see these requests because they are handled before application code. Wiz compares the episode to Log4Shell, the 2021 flaw buried in software dependencies. The comparison fits on one point: PHP sits inside products you did not write, and the vendor's advisory is the only place to learn whether a product bundles it and when a patch will come, if it ever will.

ConnectWise sells software to the outside IT firms that mid-sized companies hire to run their technology, and says more than 100,000 of those firms use its platform. One of its products, ConnectWise Cloud Backup, backs up customers' Microsoft 365 accounts, and it does so through a service account: a software identity that signs in on its own, with broad standing permissions, rather than a person. A service account has no phone to approve a prompt, so multifactor authentication, the second check a person has to pass, does not apply to it. Whoever holds its credential signs in as the software, and this one could change data as well as read it. One credential for the app could therefore open every customer account that had approved it. A credential for the product was stolen, and on October 15th it was used to sign into customer companies' Microsoft 365 accounts. Huntress, a security firm that monitors small and mid-size companies' Microsoft environments, has confirmed at least 162 accounts reached.

ConnectWise found the problem the same day and on October 17th disabled seven app identities and invalidated the shared credentials. Its backup services stayed suspended with no restoration date through October 19th and were being restored in phases by October 21st. In about 50 accounts Huntress monitors, ConnectWise's own apps gave themselves administrator rights, which Huntress says looks like ConnectWise's automation, though the company has not confirmed that. In one clearly hostile case an app received full control and added credentials to two other apps. Shutting off the vendor's apps leaves anything already changed inside a customer's account in place, and each customer has to find it.

Microsoft, as reported by Reuters on October 21st, attributed the intrusion to Storm-0940, a China-aligned group, and said most of its targeting failed but the group quickly gained privileged access that persisted in the cloud at many organizations. ConnectWise says it has "no indicators to date" that partner backup data was compromised, and that whether a product vulnerability contributed "has not been established." The final count, what was taken and how the credential was stolen are all open.

Charles Schwab is blocking AI agents that try to act inside customer accounts, its chief executive Rick Wurster told Bloomberg TV, "We're not going to allow them to move money." JPMorgan will not let any external agent in, which its chief executive Jamie Dimon called too risky for customers and the bank, the Financial Times reports, and a spokesperson said a customer who hands login details to an agent that then acts against their wishes is responsible for the result. Citi does not allow third-party AI agents to log into a customer's account or transact directly on its digital banking platforms. Bank of America has signaled it is restricting agents' access to deposits while it works out who is responsible for payments an AI approves, and its chief executive Brian Moynihan said this week that a person must approve any money leaving an account. Liability is not the only reason. The Financial Times also ties the blocks to deposit flight, since an agent can move cash from accounts paying about 0.1% to accounts paying 3.3% to 5%, a gap Apollo's economist Torsten Slok highlights.

The EU court decided the other side of the question on October 15th. A Polish customer had brought a case against PKO BP, a Polish bank, over an unauthorized payment, and the Court of Justice of the European Union held that a bank "may not refuse to refund immediately to a payer the amount of an unauthorised payment transaction" because the customer made it possible through gross negligence. The refund is due by the end of the next business day. The bank carries the burden of proving gross negligence and may sue to recover afterward. A Belgian consumer group, Testachats-Testaankoop, told the Brussels Times that banks must "pay first and only then argue the case." The ruling is about unauthorized payments. It does not decide whether a payment an agent made with credentials its owner handed over counts as authorized.

The US rule for consumer accounts points the other way. Regulation E, the federal rule on consumers' electronic transfers, caps a consumer's liability for an unauthorized transfer at $50 if reported within two business days and $500 if reported later, and leaves it unlimited for transfers on a statement not reported within 60 days. Its official interpretation adds that when a consumer grants authority to make transfers to a person, such as a family member or co-worker, who exceeds that authority, "the consumer is fully liable for the transfers" unless the consumer had told the bank that person was no longer authorized. Whether an AI agent is a "person" granted authority is untested.

The nearest precedents lean toward the user. In February 2024 a British Columbia small-claims tribunal held Air Canada liable for its own chatbot's misstatement, a non-binding ruling about a company's own bot rather than a customer's agent. On August 4th the Ninth Circuit, a federal appeals court, vacated an injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity's Comet, an AI browsing agent that acts on a user's behalf, writing that on the facts before it, "It is the user who 'accesses' Amazon's computers." That case is about website access, not payment. In the EU the bank refunds first and argues afterward; in the US a consumer who grants authority to someone who exceeds it is fully liable. An agent sits on the line between them, and Bank of America says the process for deciding is not yet set.

Governments are lending out the oil they hold for emergencies and expecting it back with interest. On October 22nd Germany lowered how much oil it must keep, from 90 days of use to 82, with no end date. In the US, the Energy Department made three loans in two weeks: to ExxonMobil and BP America, to Phillips 66, and 315,000 barrels of diesel from its Northeast home heating oil reserve. Each comes back with extra barrels, so none is a permanent addition to supply.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is the group of countries that agree to hold emergency oil and release it together in a crisis. It agreed in March to release 400 million barrels, the largest release in its history. On October 15th it agreed to speed up the rest, including over 20 million barrels of diesel. Its October oil market report describes buffers shrinking.

Releasing crude does not make diesel. The IEA says the stock release largely consists of crude oil, that the global refining system is stretched to the limit, and that nearly 2 million barrels a day of refining capacity in the Gulf remains shut. Its board statement points to tightness above all in diesel. Brent, the international crude benchmark, settled at $116.72 on October 23rd, and Reuters reports it was the highest settlement since April.

Trump is weighing large-scale strikes on Iran against continuing the US naval blockade of Iranian ports and sanctions, Al Jazeera reports, and has made no decision. The Hill, citing an anonymous source, reports that US Central Command has plans for follow-on strikes after the November 3rd midterms "if there's authorization from the White House," and Al Jazeera notes that preparing options is not an order. Al Jazeera also reports Trump suggested on Saturday that a strike could come as soon as the next day, so the midterms are not a floor.

Reuters' two sources, both anonymous, said Iran has detailed plans to hit the undersea communications cables in the Gulf if the US and Israel attack again. They offered little detail and did not say how or where. One said Iran has "full access" to the cables and one said it would prevent repairs, which would prolong outages. On the record, Yadollah Javani, deputy head of political affairs for the Revolutionary Guards, said October 21st that Iran could target seven major cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage at the mouth of the Gulf. Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography, a telecom research firm, says less than 1% of international bandwidth passes through Hormuz. The Red Sea carries more, about a tenth of the traffic between regions, and Reuters says it could be the more significant target if Iran had the Houthis' help. Alex Vatanka of the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank, reads the threats as deterrence.

The part of the threat with a precedent is blocking repairs. In February 2024 the anchor of the Rubymar, a ship the Houthis had sunk, cut three cables in the Red Sea, according to Bloomberg reporting carried by gCaptain, a maritime news site. One of them, AAE-1, came back online in mid-July, about four and a half months later, after permit negotiations over Yemeni waters took months, and repairs to the other two were still under way. Separately, Britain's law on damaging undersea cables dates from 1885, and its government opened a consultation on replacing it on October 22nd.

El Niño is a warming of the tropical Pacific that shifts weather around the world, bringing drought to some regions and floods to others. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center calls a "strong-to-very strong El Niño likely through January-March 2027," and defines a historic event as one stronger than any since 1950. NOAA does not use the word "super"; markets and analysts do.

The last big ones show what it does to business. A 2015 International Monetary Fund working paper found El Niño shocks bring a short-lived fall in economic activity in Australia, Chile, Indonesia, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa, raise growth in the United States and Europe, and raise short-run inflation in most countries as energy and commodity prices climb. Moody's, in an analysis reported by Reinsurance News, puts Australian bushfire risk more than 50% higher than in non-El Niño years while tropical cyclone risk may fall, and warns of a drier Asian monsoon that threatens rice and palm oil yields. It cites Hurricane Ida in 2021, more than $30 billion insured, and Ian in 2022, more than $53 billion, to show that a single landfalling storm can cost tens of billions whatever the season's overall activity.

Money managers are already preparing their portfolios for it, Bloomberg reports. "It's become almost a full-on certainty that this is going to be the most extreme El Niño we've had in history," said Katie Self, a portfolio manager at Pictet Asset Management.

It arrives in a food system already under strain. The International Monetary Fund's October outlook, as Axios reports it, sees fertilizer prices up 10% and food costs up 5% this year, with food costs up a further 2.4% in 2027, and an S&P Global Institute report Axios cites calls the combination of war and weather a "multidirectional squeeze on world agriculture."

The exemptions, known as exclusions, cover 178 categories of goods from the tariffs Washington imposed on Chinese imports over forced technology transfer: 164 general ones and 14 for solar manufacturing equipment. The Trade Representative's notice of December 1st, 2025, citing the November 1st US-China deal, extended them through 11:59 p.m. Eastern on November 9th, 2026. The exclusion applies to goods "entered for consumption, or withdrawn from warehouse for consumption" before that moment, so the test is the day the goods clear customs. If the exclusions lapse, the extra tariff comes back at 25% on the first three rounds of China tariffs and 7.5% on the fourth, according to Great Lakes Customs Law, a customs law firm.

These exclusions have reached a cliff several times since May 2024 and each time the Trade Representative extended them, for three to twelve months, most recently on November 26th, 2025, three days before the prior expiry. Thomson Reuters reported October 12th that the broader US-China truce had reportedly been extended by the Treasury to January 10th, 2027, though not yet in an order or notice.

A separate court challenge got under way on October 20th. Gellert Global Group, a New Jersey importer of Canadian cheese, sued in the Court of International Trade, the federal court for customs disputes, over the 50% tariffs on Canadian goods, which cover about $20 billion of goods. The tariffs rest on a 1930 law that lets the president impose duties on countries that discriminate against US goods, and the suit says it has not been used to levy tariffs at any point since it was passed. The suit argues Canada's alleged discrimination was never adequately identified and the product list grew without the required 30-day wait, and it asks the court to void the tariffs, stop their collection and require refunds. The White House says it will defend them vigorously.