PHP armageddon: OpenAI, Google’s Wiz find ancient holes, panicking the internet
Tech giants OpenAI and Google's Wiz used artificial intelligence to discover two critical, decades-old security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language. The flaws affect roughly 70% of websites on the internet and prompted urgent patching warnings from the NSA.
Why it matters
Because PHP powers a massive portion of the global web including WordPress, unpatched servers face severe security risks, highlighting both the danger of legacy software and the potential of AI in cybersecurity.
The U.S. National Security Agency’s sent out an alarming warning on Wednesday that two critical holes had been found in PHP, with patches already issued by the PHP Foundation .
PHP is a server-side programming language so widely used for web applications that it powers roughly 70% of the websites on the internet; by some accounts, that’s more than 33 million sites . It is also used by popular content management systems like WordPress.
The NSA warned that these holes are so severe that if a website can’t be patched immediately, it should be pulled off the web until it can be. The holes allow attackers to infiltrate the server’s file system or a database that may be used by the web app.
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