Lyra traced the access logs. The attacker hadn’t just found the file—they’d used it. POST requests to eval-stdin.php with base64-encoded payloads. System reconnaissance. Database dumps. A reverse shell that had been sleeping inside their cloud environment for eleven days.

Lyra stared at the terminal. The breach alert had blinked twice, then gone silent—not fixed, but hidden . That was worse.

If you're still encountering issues, consider providing more details about your project setup (PHP version, PHPUnit version, etc.) and the exact error message you're seeing. This would help in giving a more specific solution.

Nevertheless, a compromised composer.json that allows arbitrary test execution could potentially abuse this script. This is why security best practices mandate keeping vendor/bin/phpunit out of production.

She had tried to fix it. She had pushed the change. But the deployment script ignored vendor exclusions, and PHPUnit was a dev dependency that somehow lingered in the production image like a curse.