Symfony Station Communiqué - 17 May 2024: A look at Symfony, Drupal, PHP, Cybersec, and Fediverse News!

This communiqué originally appeared on Symfony Station.

Welcome to this week's Symfony Station communiqué. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can't be free without safety and privacy.

There's good content in all of our categories (with a lot on Drupal's Starshot and PHP 8.4), so please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you. This is why we publish on Fridays. So you can savor it over your weekend.

Or jump straight to your favorite section via our website.

• Symfony Universe


• PHP


• More Programming


• Fighting for Democracy


• Cybersecurity


• Fediverse

Once again, thanks go out to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans.

Symfony

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> "This week, Symfony continued tweaking and polishing the new features of Symfony 7.1, which will be released at the end of May 2024. Meanwhile, we published some blog posts showcasing Symfony 7.1 features such as the new TypeInfo component, the IsCsrfTokenValid attribute, new constraints, the MapUploadedFile attribute and some WebProfiler improvements. Lastly, we published more talks for the SymfonyOnline June 2024 online conference."

A Week of Symfony #906 (6-12 May 2024)

They also have:

New in Symfony 7.1: Improved Access Token Authenticator

New in Symfony 7.1: Expanding UniqueEntity Constraint to Any PHP Class

New in Symfony 7.1: New Dependency Injection Attributes

SymfonyOnline June 2024: Announcement of workshops topics!

New in Symfony 7.1: Constraint Improvements

SymfonyOnline June 2024: Front-end application development, Symfony-style(s)

This looks like a good one and also covers API Platform.

SymfonyOnline June 2024: Using Git magic for the Symfony mono-repo

Ditto.

New in Symfony 7.1: Mailer and Notifier Integrations

Featured Item

We're "tooting" our own horn this week with our latest article.

If you follow us you know we are champions of the Fediverse. And have written extensively about it. Like Symfony, PHP, Drupal, Sylius, etc. it's open-source and a moral alternative and new foe of corporate social media. Which we can all agree is shit. This article is motivated in particular by our being selected as one of the first few hundred Fediverse publishers on Flipboard and gaining ten new handles. So, I want to help you sort out the ones you may want to follow. And of course, my existing ones as well. But more importantly I want to help you start your journey through the Fediverse by benefiting from my experience.

Intrigued by the Fediverse - Traverse our Accounts to Map your Journey

This Week

Rahul Chavan explores:

Symfony’s Route Attribute Mapping{foo:bar}: A Shortcut to Smoother Routing

Matheo Daninos shows us:

How to share your TwigComponent with your team

Les Tilleuls Coop announces:

API Platform Conference 2024 speaker lineup

Marat Latypov has:

Removing orphaned Parents with Doctrine

Platforms

eCommerce

Dragan Rapić shares:

Shopware 6 search under the hood

CMSs

TYPO3 has:

Call for Community Budget Ideas (Q3/2024)

The Double-Edged Sword: How the Same CMS Features Can Make or Break a Sale

T3CON Recap—Web Analytics: Balancing Data Collection, Privacy, and User Experience

Joomla has:

Joomla Takes The GAAD Pledge

Matt Glaman examines:

Starshot, recipe to cook up ambitious Drupal applications

Gábor Hojtsy has:

15 reasons I am excited about Drupal's new Starshot initiative

Drupal 11 deep dive: watch the recording, present your own (free slides!)

Mike Herchel shares his:

Thoughts on Drupal's new Starshot Initiative

Previous Next looks at:

Starshot and Experience Builder

WebWash shows us how to:

Download and Install Drupal Starshot Beta

Electric Citizen sees:

Big Changes Ahead for Drupal

This is the first item I've seen on Drupal's marketing changes. They are long overdue.

Redfin Solutions recaps:

DrupalCon Portland: A Recap from Redfin CTO, Chris Wells

DDEV also recaps:

DrupalCon Portland 2024 Wrapup

Aten Design Group has:

Drupal API Development Simplified with APITools Module

Specbee explores:

Drupal Translation Modules: How to create Multilingual Drupal websites

ACDI Solutions shows us:

How to quickly integrate Angular with a Drupal website

And WebWash show us:

How to Create Content Blocks in Drupal

Simple, but if you are new to Drupal, it’s useful.

The Drop Times shares:

Policy-Based Access in Core by Kristiaan Van den Enyde

Tag1 Consulting continues its series:

Migrating Your Data from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 using the Migrate API: Avoiding entity ID conflicts

ImageX Media says:

Save Time, Maintain Consistency: Bulk-Update Drupal Content Instantly with the Field Defaults Module

Four Kitchens is:

Playing with FIRE

Backdrop CMS announces:

Backdrop 1.28 released!

Previous Weeks

Andrew Fletcher examines:

Accessing nested paragraph fields in Drupal: a step-by-step reference

Great stuff.

Acquia shares:

DrupalCon Portland Day 4 Recap

PHP

This Week

Tomas Votruba has an analogy:

Cool features of Swiss Army Knife

Raziel Rodrigues looks at:

Mastering Object Calisthenics in PHP 8: Crafting Cleaner Code

phpFashion shows us:

How to Handle Getters When They Have Nothing to Return?

And Veljko Ristic shows us:

How to Validate Emails in PHP: regex, filter_var(), and API Explained

Assia Ettalibi explores:

Building a Secured User Authentication System with PHP, MySQL, PDO and hashed password

David Eduardo Karpinski has:

Making Life Difficult For Intruders: Installing PHP Intrusion Detection System

Sticher shares:

What's new in PHP 8.4

PHP Watch shows us:

How to fix mysql_native_password not loaded errors on MySQL 8.4

Laravel News asks:

Is class instantiation without extra parenthesis coming to PHP 8.4?

Rustcode examines:

The Future Of Php

Previous Weeks

Wendell Adriel asks:

Why use Custom Exceptions in PHP?

More Programming

Flipboard has an interview:

Entering a New Phase of the Web, with Citation Needed’s Molly White

Smaine Milliani looks at:

Le rôle d’Engineering Manager vu d’un Dev

I guess this is why his outstanding blogging has fallen off lately.

Sarah Savage explores:

Using common networks for communicating via microservices

Grant Horwood examines:

NGINX: serving private files with X-Accel-Redirect

Smashing Magazine looks at:

Transforming The Relationship Between Designers And Developers

Beyond CSS Media Queries

Oliver Davies explores:

Merging without merge commits

Manav Bajaj has:

JWT Explained

Open Source Initiative annouces:

The Open Source AI Definition gets closer to reality with a global workshop series

Fighting for Democracy

Please visit our Support Ukraine pageto learn how you can help

kick Russia out of Ukraine (eventually, like ending apartheid in South Africa).

The cyber response to Russia’s War Crimes and other douchebaggery

The Financial Times reports:

Big Tech regulatory crackdown spreads to Asia and Australia

The Next Web reports:

Booking.com joins tech giants as ‘gatekeeper’ under EU competition rules

A new browser war is brewing in Europe

TechCrunch reports:

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

BleepingComputer reports:

FCC reveals Royal Tiger, its first tagged robocall threat actor

FBI seize BreachForums hacking forum used to leak stolen data

Euronews reports:

European Union bans four media outlets for peddling Russian propaganda

The Verge reports:

Instagram and Facebook under EU investigation for causing child addiction and harm

Invezz reports:

EU set to issue new antitrust charges against Microsoft over Teams app

El Pais reports:

Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

Since they are the main mofos spreading it, this is no surprise.

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Bert Hubert reports:

Cyber Security: A Pre-War Reality Check

The Hacker News reports:

Turla Group Deploys LunarWeb and LunarMail Backdoors in Diplomatic Missions

The Guardian reports:

Russia directing hackers to attack UK and west, says director of GCHQ

The Markup reports:

Mortgage Brokers Sent People’s Estimated Credit, Address, and Veteran Status to Facebook

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports:

Investigation: How Russia's Warplanes Get Their 'Brain Power' From The West, Despite Sanctions


BleepingComputer reports:

Kimsuky hackers deploy new Linux backdoor in attacks on South Korea

Ars Technica reports:

Arizona woman accused of helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at 300 companies

Wow.

404 Media reports:

OpenAI’s GPT-4o Isn’t ‘Her,’ It’s ‘Metropolis’

AI Generated Hentai Is Viral All Over Facebook

Cybersecurity/Privacy

And:

Cyber Official Speaks Out, Reveals Mobile Network Attacks in U.S.

Dark Reading reports:

Cybersecurity in a Race to Unmask a New Wave of AI-Borne Deepfakes

They opine:

There Is No Cyber Labor Shortage

CNN reports:

Black Basta Cyberattack forces major US health care network to divert ambulances from hospitals

Fediverse

The Fediverse Report has:

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 68

Ghost writes:

Building ActivityPub: Day 0

Flipboard shares:

Lessons on the Road to Reviving Journalism via the Fediverse

Over 100,000 Social Interactions From the Fediverse to Flipboard

As mentioned last week, I am one of the second set of Flipboard Fediverse publishers, so this is great to see.

TechCrunch reports:

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

And did you see the featured article? 😉

Other Federated Social Media

TechDirt opines:

Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It

The Fediverse Report reports:

Video, audio and blogging: Japanese Bluesky is building in the ATmosphere

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

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  Symfony-based experience. We have aSymfony Magazineand Collectionthere.

Do you own or work for an organization that would be interested in our promotion opportunities? Or supporting our journalistic efforts? If so, please get in touch with us. We’re in our toddler stage, so it’s extra economical. 😉

More importantly, if you are a Ukrainian company with coding-related products, we can offer free promotion onour Support Ukraine page. Or, if you know of one, get in touch.

You can find a vast array of curated evergreen content on our communiqués page.

Author

Reuben Walker

Founder

Symfony Station

SecRule REQUEST_URI "@rx ..." "id:1001,phase:1,deny,status:403"

find /var/www -type f -name "*.php" -mmin -120

ss -tunp | grep -E ":(4444|1337|8080|9001)"

apt update && apt --only-upgrade install <pkg>

title: Detect Exploitation - Symfony Station Communiqué - 17 May 2024: A look at Symfony, Drupal, PHP, Cybersec, and Fediverse News!
id: e55b2055-d4d5-42ec-9b52-44f0494e34b0
status: experimental
description: Automatisch generierte SIEM-Erkennungsregel basierend auf CTI Intelligence
references:
  - https://tsecurity.de/
author: iShareStuff CTI Automated Detection Engine
date: 2026-09-25
logsource:
  category: network_connection
  product: any
detection:
  selection:
      CommandLine|contains:
        - 'exploit'
  condition: selection
falsepositives:
  - Legitime administrative Zugriffe oder Penetrationstests
level: high
tags:
  - attack.initial_access

rule CTI_Threat_Indicator {
    meta:
        author = "iShareStuff CTI Automated Detection Engine"
        date = "2026-09-25"
        description = "YARA Signature for "
    strings:
        $str = "Symfony Station Communiqué - 1" ascii wide
    condition:
        any of them
}

index=security sourcetype IN ("cisco:asa", "pan:traffic", "zeek_conn", "suricata", "WinEventLog:Security")
("Symfony Station Communiqu - 17 May 2024 ")
| stats count earliest(_time) as first_seen latest(_time) as last_seen by src_ip, dest_ip, dest_host, signature
| eval first_seen=strftime(first_seen, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"), last_seen=strftime(last_seen, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
| sort - count

message: "*Symfony Station Communiqu - 17 May 2024 *"

CommonSecurityLog
| where Message has "Symfony Station Communiqu - 17 May 2024 "
| summarize EventCount = count(), FirstSeen = min(TimeGenerated), LastSeen = max(TimeGenerated) by SourceIP, DestinationIP, DestinationPort, Activity
| extend DetectionRule = "iShareStuff-CTI-Compiled"
| sort by EventCount desc