On 24 Oct 2013 06:15:39 +0000 Google started saying www.php.net was hosting malware. The Google Webmaster Tools were initially quite delayed in showing the reason why and when they did it looked a lot like a false positive because we had some minified/obfuscated javascript being dynamically injected into userprefs.js. This looked suspicious to us as well, but it was actually written to do exactly that so we were quite certain it was a false positive, but we kept digging.

It turned out that by combing through the access logs for static.php.net it was periodically serving up userprefs.js with the wrong content length and then reverting back to the right size after a few minutes. This is due to an rsync cron job. So the file was being modified locally and reverted. Google's crawler caught one of these small windows where the wrong file was being served, but of course, when we looked at it manually it looked fine. So more confusion.

We are still investigating how someone caused that file to be changed, but in the meantime we have migrated www/static to new clean servers. The highest priority is obviously the source code integrity and after a quick:

git fsck --no-reflog --full --strict

on all our repos plus manually checking the md5sums of the PHP distribution files we see no evidence that the PHP code has been compromised. We have a mirror of our git repos on github.com and we will manually check git commits as well and have a full post-mortem on the intrusion when we have a clearer picture of what happened.