AI Just Found a Bug That Puts Up to 70% of the World’s Websites at Risk
Researchers and security firms said the flaws could let attackers run commands on vulnerable servers, prompting emergency updates and precautionary outages worldwide.
- On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, the PHP Foundation released emergency updates to patch two critical remote-code-execution vulnerabilities affecting the widely used programming language. Maintainers urged administrators to update systems immediately.
- Researchers at security firm Calif and Wiz discovered the flaws using AI models in August, marking a shift in vulnerability detection. PHP underpins roughly 75% of identified websites, creating systemic risk across WordPress, Drupal, and Magento platforms.
- Rated 9.2 in severity on the CVSS v4.0 scale, the 'PHP2Shell' vulnerabilities allow unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code. Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht reported the company was "seeing early attacks emerging" and updating firewall rules.
- Following warnings from the European Union Computer Emergency Response Team and the National Security Agency , organizations were advised to isolate internet-facing applications. Government websites in the Netherlands and Finland proactively went offline Wednesday as a precautionary measure.
- Describing the current patching process as "slow and manual," OpenAI President Greg Brockman warned that AI-driven vulnerability discovery will likely accelerate in the coming months. Security experts are now bracing for a "race to exploit" as attackers scan for unupdated servers.
657 Articles
657 Articles
Some websites go dark as operators address an AI-detected flaw in a web programming language - WXXV News 25
By BARBARA ORTUTAY An AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language led governments and other organizations in Europe and the U.S. to take their websites offline temporarily Wednesday as they scrambled to make security updates. The FBI’s cyber division warned the vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to remotely execute code in the programming language, PHP, which powers...
Internet races to fend off newly discovered security flaws
{beacon} Technology Technology The Big Story Internet races to fend off newly discovered security flaws The National Security Agency (NSA) warned organizations Wednesday to immediately patch a pair of security flaws or take their systems offline after artificial intelligence discovered vulnerabilities in a key programming language. © AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File “Effective Immediately, all...
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