Why your Laravel app is probably already compromised

Right now, as you read this, someone might be inside your Laravel application.

Not browsing. Not testing. Executing commands. Uploading files. Creating backdoors that will survive your next deployment.

And you probably have no idea.

The uncomfortable truth

Let me share some numbers that should make you uncomfortable:

WordPress has Wordfence. It has Sucuri. It has MalCare, Imunify360, and dozens of other security solutions fighting for market share.

Laravel has nothing.

No dedicated scanner. No real-time monitoring. No automated threat detection designed specifically for the Laravel ecosystem.

And attackers know this.

The gap nobody talks about

While WordPress developers sleep soundly knowing their $99/year security plugin is watching their sites, Laravel developers are flying blind.

We trust our framework. We trust our hosting. We trust that “nobody would target us.”

Until they do.

What attackers see

When an attacker looks at your Laravel application, they see:

1. A predictable structure - They know where your storage/ directory is. They know where uploads go. They know public/ is web-accessible.

2. A powerful framework - Laravel’s flexibility means more attack surface. Route model binding, Eloquent, Blade - all features that can be exploited.

3. No security monitoring - No alerts when a PHP file appears in storage/app/public/. No notifications when eval() shows up in an uploaded file.

4. Trusting developers - Who don’t run security scans. Who don’t check for CVEs. Who deploy on Friday and don’t look back.

The numbers don’t lie

Our research has documented:

• 87 unique malware signatures targeting PHP applications
• 12 critical CVEs in the Laravel ecosystem from 2024-2026
• 7 major webshell families actively deployed against Laravel sites
• 5 entropy evasion techniques used to bypass traditional scanners

And these are just the patterns we know about.

”It won’t happen to me”

That’s what we thought too.

Then December 2025 happened.

Our production Laravel application - a real business, real users, real data - was compromised. Backdoors were planted. SEO spam directories appeared overnight. We discovered it by accident, not by design.

Three weeks later, it happened again to another site.

Two attacks. Two different projects. Same story: no monitoring, no detection, no warning signs until it was almost too late.

This book exists because of those attacks. Every signature, every detection algorithm, every security check you’ll read about - they come from real experience with real malware on real Laravel applications.

What you’ll learn

Over the next 11 chapters, we’ll cover:

• Real case studies from attacks we survived
• The 6 attack vectors most commonly used against Laravel
• 87 malware signatures you should be scanning for
• 12 CVEs every Laravel developer must know about
• Entropy evasion - how modern malware hides from scanners
• 40 security checks you can implement today
• AI-powered detection - the future of Laravel security

By the end, you’ll understand not just what threatens your applications, but how to detect it - and better yet, how to automate that detection so you never have to think about it again.

The choice

You can close this book and go back to hoping.

Or you can keep reading and start knowing.

Because the question isn’t whether your Laravel application can be compromised.

The question is whether you’ll know when it happens.

Next: Chapter 2 - ClipCraft and Cetatean-ro: Two Attacks We Survived →

In the next chapter, we’ll walk through the actual timeline of two real attacks, including the exact files that were planted, how they spread, and what we learned from cleaning them up.