I have a lot of Linux sysadmin experience but haven't touched Apache in more than a decade. I thought it's mostly nginx or other solutions at this point.
At least 21% of web sites use Apache httpd, and of course many sites don’t report the software used at all. Nginx is also frequently used as a reverse proxy, with Apache used behind it.
Apache has plenty of life left, it just works™, supports almost everything, and currently is about as efficient as nginx WRT connection handling. Sometimes you want what .htacces gives you. (No built-in Lua though.)
Apache has mod_md -- an acme client, which lets you obtain https certificates as easily as on caddy, without integrating with awkward separate programs.
Apache has a feature that no other http server has replicated: .htaccess files.
They provide limited configurability of server functionality within a webroot. That's extremely convenient for PHP webapps. For many PHP apps, deploying them on anything that is not apache means touching the server config itself.
PHP can go to hell. My hair is gray because of it. Nginx is superior, and I can get anything imaginable done with config files. And not to mention, it's much faster.
I don't understand what they mean by "51% of cloud environments" have a publicly exposed instance. What is a "cloud environment"? Do they mean a cloud hosting provider like AWS or Google? Are they saying that between those two only one of them has an instance of a vulnerable Apache server running?
This took 7 minutes and $0.02 in deepseek spend through a subscription to reproduce. The prompt was simply directed at a vulnerable version and told to find a h2 race, which is generically the most common culprit these days. Once it found one, I had it attempt the same against a patched version (which failed).
Disabling h2 is the mitigation and is effective. The patch itself seems a little odd as a fix to me personally, but eh.
>Due to improper synchronization when executing concurrent threads sharing resources, an attacker can trigger heap corruption.
>As of the time of this blog’s publication, no exploit is available and there are no reports of exploitation in the wild.
Since when does "memory corruption" = "RCE"? Last week I found and reproduced a memory corruption (a use-after-free) in PHP's runtime after running an on-premise agent for just 30 minutes. There's nothing about it on the internet. Should I write a blog post about a scary new vulnerability? :)
If you can corrupt memory in a controllable way, you can get a computer to do just about anything that process has rights to. Possibly even the kernel, if you can get at some shared memory.
Presumably one of Anthropic, Google, or Apache possesses a working exploit, because the official Apache Foundation report on this CVE claims RCE is possible.
I was prepared to disagree with you, but I agree: I'd say there's a strong norm of not calling things RCE unless you can actually demonstrate RCE, or at least have a clean pathway to demonstrating it (e.g. a full write-what-where).
It's perfectly sufficient to have a CVE for just memory corruption, so the "RCE" framing here feels overstated. Particularly when an LLM should easily prove RCE out if it is in fact present.
> (...) public research has demonstrated a reliable exploit against a default-configured server with the mod_http2 module enabled. Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, gain full control of the server process, and access or modify sensitive information.
I don't know the backstory here, but there's a long and colorful history of vendors and other parties guessing that some contrived memory corruption bug isn't exploitable and then being proven wrong, so the industry now more or less defaults to the assumption that it's exploitable.
Let me remind you that in response to the PHP bug, one of the front-page HN posts was a guy saying it's probably not exploitable and another offering Bitcoin to anyone who pops their server... with predictable results.
People can be pretty creative with exploitation primitives, and LLMs now replicate that at a scale. And yep, if you found a use-after-free that can be triggered remotely in PHP under some reasonable assumptions, you should probably treat it as a security bug.
Well I know someone who will get bitten - a couple of years I did some work (because security said so) to make sure we always pulled latest Apache when building our Docker container. Someone ripped that change out not long ago because it was too hard to maintain the Debian repo config changes needed to pull it in, and as a result they'll probably get stung by having a version right in the meaty part of that range.
all my handwritten sockets servers are fine because I use HTTP/1.1
I have 1 apache acting as a proxy for vhosts and
> a2dismod http2
gives me
> Module http2 already disabled
I don’t want to tempt fate (and hackers ) but I have dodged lots of major vulns this year with my strategy of writing code by hand instead of pip installing everything
only vuln I was exposed to was copy.fail, but that was a defense in depth weakness, and I was vulnerable to the kvm weakness if there was a malicious tenant in my host’s hypervisor, but that’s not fair I’m poor so I don’t have a dedi.
maybe the tcp vuln was the most exposed I’ve been but that was a very short window that got auto upgraded by apt with a high attack complexity
maybe I can write about how I survived 2026 without getting a supply chain vuln and get some work or students on new years? I feel that’ll be a pretty big accolade.
Not everything benefits from pipelineling and multiplexing. I wish there existed a protocol that's even simpler than HTTP 1.1, which would be good for exposing APIs. Something like Thrift, but maybe even simpler and more bulletproof.
same reason i'd imagine that one might have wanted medical assistance be denied to covid deniers who inevitably did contract covid, and started experiencing the FO part of FAFO: retribution and consistency
Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.
AI finding vulns? I don’t see how it’s different from valgrind, static analysis, afl, or other fuzzer. I don’t think getting fresh, high-signal analysis is what AI-hating projects are concerned with.
> Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.
I've seen on a few open source projects I follow the 100% AI patch with notes to the effect of "I haven't compiled let alone tested these changes but AI said it's fine and my cursory glance agrees".
Like come on - I'm not going to judge using AI to make a useful change, but at least put in more than zero effort.
Depends on exactly what it is that a project is objecting to. For example, here's Nura:
> AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy[1] and water[2] to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions[3], usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material[4] and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process[5] (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody[6]). Furthermore, they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs[7]. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly.
If you really believe that AI tools are automatically unethical because they destroy the environment, harm workers, and constitute an attack on FOSS infrastructure, then it doesn't really matter how the tool is being used. If you just don't want to see code quality decline, then it's probably not a problem.
Patch looks like https://github.com/apache/httpd/commit/5ed39287660daacd1233c...
I have a lot of Linux sysadmin experience but haven't touched Apache in more than a decade. I thought it's mostly nginx or other solutions at this point.
At least 21% of web sites use Apache httpd, and of course many sites don’t report the software used at all. Nginx is also frequently used as a reverse proxy, with Apache used behind it.
At work we use Apache because of mod_shib. We have yet to try nginx-http-shibboleth.
Default Wordpress docker image uses it.
Apache has plenty of life left, it just works™, supports almost everything, and currently is about as efficient as nginx WRT connection handling. Sometimes you want what .htacces gives you. (No built-in Lua though.)
i mostly use nginx lua to patch on some feature i had even on bare Apache, let alone all the core modules.
Why would I not use apache if everything already works with it for me?
Apache has mod_md -- an acme client, which lets you obtain https certificates as easily as on caddy, without integrating with awkward separate programs.
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_md.html
nginx has that too https://blog.nginx.org/blog/native-support-for-acme-protocol
My whole selfhosted mess is built around Apache. It was what I started with and I haven't run into any edge cases that it can't cover.
I am the same way. I use Caddy if I can. But I have a lot of docker containers running apache and nginx. You probably might too.
Apache has a feature that no other http server has replicated: .htaccess files.
They provide limited configurability of server functionality within a webroot. That's extremely convenient for PHP webapps. For many PHP apps, deploying them on anything that is not apache means touching the server config itself.
PHP can go to hell. My hair is gray because of it. Nginx is superior, and I can get anything imaginable done with config files. And not to mention, it's much faster.
The http servers drag race finished 15 years ago on a tie, it's really much a matter of taste and familiarity more than performance at this point.
The lazy bastard in me prefers Caddy.
Eh. You can use .htaccess in nginx too. I use that everyday.
Does not Microsoft's IIS also have that with web.config files?
Chances are most Apache/PHP installations run mpm_prefork and aren’t affected by this.
why? mod_mpm_event is what can be assumed to be the default since apache 2.4 (± 2012):
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mpm.html#defaults
IIRC popular apache/php platforms such as cpanel, official wordpress docker container image, etc use mpm_prefork by default.
> What is CVE-2026-111497?
> CVE-2026-119618 is a critical, high-severity vulnerability involving....
two CVEs? (111497 != 11968)
I saw that too. CVE-2026-111497 is the Brotli CVE, so my guess is they reused that prior page as a base to start with and missed changing that.
You'd think they'd have an LLM reviewing this by now. On the up side, it is refreshing to see good ol' human error still around on the surface!
What makes you think it's not already an LLM error?
Even a tiny model would pick up an error like this during review.
just had claude today spew some basic firewall rules for port 5900 and 5901... it used 5900 and 59001
If you use modern LLMs a lot you'll know they are much better at catching these kind of copy and paste errors than humans are.
duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50453368
What is the benefit of using Apache over enjinx?
Apache is more opinionated, some people like that.
(I personally think it's slow and ugly, but to each their own)
I don't understand what they mean by "51% of cloud environments" have a publicly exposed instance. What is a "cloud environment"? Do they mean a cloud hosting provider like AWS or Google? Are they saying that between those two only one of them has an instance of a vulnerable Apache server running?
I think they’re likely referring to either a Cloud Org (AWS Organisation, Google Cloud Org, Azure Tenant).
Wiz works by plugging their tool into your Cloud Org, so presumably they’re saying 51% of their enterprise-y customers have an exposed instance.
what is amazing, there are no apache updated containers / packages available yet.
At least disabling http2 is an easy countermeasure that will probably in most setups not have any real downsides.
If it was even enabled that is.
Why are these things being disclosed before fixes have been rolled out? Is no-one following disclosure protocols any more?
Debian tracker: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2026-119618 - hopefully the fix lands soon
LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed affected by this?
This took 7 minutes and $0.02 in deepseek spend through a subscription to reproduce. The prompt was simply directed at a vulnerable version and told to find a h2 race, which is generically the most common culprit these days. Once it found one, I had it attempt the same against a patched version (which failed).
Disabling h2 is the mitigation and is effective. The patch itself seems a little odd as a fix to me personally, but eh.
Did it manage to produce a PoC for RCE? Apparently Redhat claimed there's a RCE, while Wiz said they don't have one.
http2 race??
What exactly is the issue and does nginx have it
gno.security/repairer
No CVSS severity level?
NIST doens't show one (yet?). I checked on RedHat and they list it at a 9.8
That's crazy high.
Time for a Rust based httpd replacement like https://xin.dev
How would Rust have fixed this security issue?
They've published an article last month on the Nginx vulnerabilities in light of their Rust implementation.
https://xin.dev/blog/multiple-nginx-vulnerabilities/
If you’re going to respond, at least make an attempt to answer the question.
Cannot find the source... (Wanted to see if they use the RusTLS)
>Due to improper synchronization when executing concurrent threads sharing resources, an attacker can trigger heap corruption.
>As of the time of this blog’s publication, no exploit is available and there are no reports of exploitation in the wild.
Since when does "memory corruption" = "RCE"? Last week I found and reproduced a memory corruption (a use-after-free) in PHP's runtime after running an on-premise agent for just 30 minutes. There's nothing about it on the internet. Should I write a blog post about a scary new vulnerability? :)
If you can corrupt memory in a controllable way, you can get a computer to do just about anything that process has rights to. Possibly even the kernel, if you can get at some shared memory.
But it's not a given that memory corruption is exploitable as an RCE specifically. I thought to call something an RCE you need a working exploit?
Isn't resource consumption a DoS?
A denial of service is a different class of vulnerability (a minor one, generally).
Presumably one of Anthropic, Google, or Apache possesses a working exploit, because the official Apache Foundation report on this CVE claims RCE is possible.
I was prepared to disagree with you, but I agree: I'd say there's a strong norm of not calling things RCE unless you can actually demonstrate RCE, or at least have a clean pathway to demonstrating it (e.g. a full write-what-where).
It's perfectly sufficient to have a CVE for just memory corruption, so the "RCE" framing here feels overstated. Particularly when an LLM should easily prove RCE out if it is in fact present.
Another comment says it has a CVSS score of 9.8 which means CVE, easy to exploit, and an exploit gives LOTS of access.
Before we get too whiny about "it's only memory corruption without any RCE PoC", let's wait until the CVE is unembargoed.
RedHat claims there's a working RCE:
> (...) public research has demonstrated a reliable exploit against a default-configured server with the mod_http2 module enabled. Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, gain full control of the server process, and access or modify sensitive information.
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2026-119618
Discovered independently by Anthropic (Oct 26) and Google (Nov 3), so I'm compelled to believe it: https://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_24
But maybe someone will post another HN challenge like with the PHP thing?
I don't know the backstory here, but there's a long and colorful history of vendors and other parties guessing that some contrived memory corruption bug isn't exploitable and then being proven wrong, so the industry now more or less defaults to the assumption that it's exploitable.
Let me remind you that in response to the PHP bug, one of the front-page HN posts was a guy saying it's probably not exploitable and another offering Bitcoin to anyone who pops their server... with predictable results.
People can be pretty creative with exploitation primitives, and LLMs now replicate that at a scale. And yep, if you found a use-after-free that can be triggered remotely in PHP under some reasonable assumptions, you should probably treat it as a security bug.
Why does it say the “vendor” for this is GitHub (for mod_h2)?
Is that just crappy LLM generated copy that is assuming that GitHub the company is responsible for that module because it’s hosted there?
Yes, this is slop, extruded from reading the patch and the official announcement, which is at https://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_24.html#CV...
From 2.4.55 through 2.4.70? Jokes on you, my version is not that new!
I'm guessing you missed out on Heartbleed too :P At work we managed to upgrade to a vulnerable version 1 month before that came out .... ugh
Well I know someone who will get bitten - a couple of years I did some work (because security said so) to make sure we always pulled latest Apache when building our Docker container. Someone ripped that change out not long ago because it was too hard to maintain the Debian repo config changes needed to pull it in, and as a result they'll probably get stung by having a version right in the meaty part of that range.
The C chansaw juggling doesn't get any safer from adding threads. Is the robust original (pre)fork configuration still supported?
I don't know, but Claude is fixing that too! (doubt that makes it safer either...)
I run apache with prefork on my personal sites. Still works. No idea if it supports http/2.
This has not been a good month for the LAMP stack…
It's not always HTTP/2. But it's a pretty safe bet.
The vulnerability affects deployments utilizing HTTP/2 capabilities
Even Apache is being filled with Claude commits, so great.....
I don't know why your comment is dead, but I meant in general perching_aix , it's just what I noticed looking up this
You prefer to leave it insecure?
It was a comment unrelated to this vulnerability
all my handwritten sockets servers are fine because I use HTTP/1.1
I have 1 apache acting as a proxy for vhosts and
> a2dismod http2
gives me
> Module http2 already disabled
I don’t want to tempt fate (and hackers ) but I have dodged lots of major vulns this year with my strategy of writing code by hand instead of pip installing everything
only vuln I was exposed to was copy.fail, but that was a defense in depth weakness, and I was vulnerable to the kvm weakness if there was a malicious tenant in my host’s hypervisor, but that’s not fair I’m poor so I don’t have a dedi.
maybe the tcp vuln was the most exposed I’ve been but that was a very short window that got auto upgraded by apt with a high attack complexity
maybe I can write about how I survived 2026 without getting a supply chain vuln and get some work or students on new years? I feel that’ll be a pretty big accolade.
isn't http/1.1 request smuggling a known risk in exactly the scenario you're using it in?
If I understand correctly that only affects reverse proxy chains, which people might just not have. Or not have in a way that is vulnerable to that?
I guess it makes sense that "the cloud" moves to it, but beyond that, it might be fine?
HTTP2 is insecure and 1.1 is slow. At this point just find a good H3 implementation and drop the old protocols.
Not everything benefits from pipelineling and multiplexing. I wish there existed a protocol that's even simpler than HTTP 1.1, which would be good for exposing APIs. Something like Thrift, but maybe even simpler and more bulletproof.
Wiz is such an amazing company. Israeli-based and recently acquired by Google, the significance of their security contributions cannot be overstated.
Another critical bug discovered by AI.
I want the rabidly AI-hating projects to stand their ground and refuse to fix vulnerabilities discovered with AI assistance.
> I want the rabidly AI-hating projects to stand their ground and refuse to fix vulnerabilities discovered with AI assistance.
Why?
same reason i'd imagine that one might have wanted medical assistance be denied to covid deniers who inevitably did contract covid, and started experiencing the FO part of FAFO: retribution and consistency
because it's just some slop generated by a bunch of stochastic parrots and can't be taken seriously :-)
Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.
AI finding vulns? I don’t see how it’s different from valgrind, static analysis, afl, or other fuzzer. I don’t think getting fresh, high-signal analysis is what AI-hating projects are concerned with.
cough Zig... cough
> No LLMs for finding bugs.
> Depending on the context and content, I tend to be against AI pull requests that haven’t been edited by a human.
I've seen on a few open source projects I follow the 100% AI patch with notes to the effect of "I haven't compiled let alone tested these changes but AI said it's fine and my cursory glance agrees".
Like come on - I'm not going to judge using AI to make a useful change, but at least put in more than zero effort.
Depends on exactly what it is that a project is objecting to. For example, here's Nura:
> AI tools have several ethical issues. They require an unreasonable amount of energy[1] and water[2] to build and operate, their models are built in part with heavily exploited workers in unacceptable working conditions[3], usually without consent from or compensation for creators of the source material[4] and oftentimes causing DDoS attacks against FOSS infrastructure in the process[5] (which in turn force the deployment of challenge-based protections and increase cost and complexity of self-hosting for everybody[6]). Furthermore, they are being used to undermine labor and justify layoffs[7]. These are harms that we do not want to perpetuate, even if only indirectly.
( https://docs.nura.eco/policies-and-processes/development/ai-... )
If you really believe that AI tools are automatically unethical because they destroy the environment, harm workers, and constitute an attack on FOSS infrastructure, then it doesn't really matter how the tool is being used. If you just don't want to see code quality decline, then it's probably not a problem.