



github.com/syhunt/php2shell-protection
has some background and possible mitigations. But I shut down all my php sites…
It’s wild to me that people are still using PHP in 2026. It was known to be a god awful trainwreck of a language all the way back in like 2005 and it certainly hasn’t improved much since then. I guess that’s what happens when a language peaks right at the height of the dotcom bubble.

I used it quite a bit right at the beginning, when it was transitioning from being a “Pre-HTML Processor” templating utility to a proper language.
The syntax was nice and easy to pick up. The rest was pretty bad, a lot of security was left to the developer following best practices.
It improved with time, but it had already left a bad impression on me.
I know it’s still popular, as you can tell from the downvotes.
A large percentage of sites use WordPress which uses PHP.
Outside of that, I’ve worked or consulted for 20-30+ companies across numerous industries and none of them used php or ever considered it.
When you have no idea what you are talking about, you post something like this
Its not 2005 anymore, not that PHP ever was a train wreck, but its not 2005 anymore. PHP has had a huge amount of improvements over the past two decades and I’ll use it over anything else
“It’s wild to me people are still using PHP”
You must be isolated from development if you think PHP is not still everywhere.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’ve been a professional programmer for over 30 years with some of the biggest companies in the world. I’ve worked with assembly, c, c++, c#, java, kotlin, perl, lua, haskell, rust, javascript, typescript, coffeescrpit, dart, php, python, and I’m sure 3 or 4 other languages I’ve just forgotten about at this point. Some of those languages are terrible and I hope never to touch again, others were great and I’d be happy to work with.
PHP should have been retired as a language 20 yeara ago, but WordPress has kept it alive all this time. The rest of the industry has moved on and learned lessons from what came before, but the sheer momentum of hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs has somehow kept PHP alive. The language started as a hack, and it remains a hack. It’s gotten faster over the years, but it’s still just as badly designed today as it was when it was originally created.

Symphony / Laravel is still super popular. I was gonna apply to a job posting at my partner’s company, but I went “eh nvm” when I saw they were using Symphony 😭
it certainly hasn’t improved much since then.
I’ve heard the opposite talked about quite a bit.
Of course it’s Primeagen. I haven’t watched this particular video, but I’ve seen enough of his videos to know he’s an idiot. I wouldn’t trust anything he says about programming, at least half of everything he says is wrong.
Most of the things wrong with PHP can’t be fixed, at least not without completely breaking all the existing PHP apps in such a fundamental way it would be tough to argue it’s still the same language.