Conversation

— ‘Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French and German sites were among those that governments took down temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites.
…
Because a fix is now public and AI tools are able to reverse engineer the bug with little effort, experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers ⁠jumped to get ahead of the updates.

AI was powering a “race to exploit”, said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP:Black. He said the next step was the “mass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet”.’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/21/flaw-in-php-computer-language-leads-to-shutdown-of-websites-around-world

— ‘Amazon Threat Intelligence, another cybersecurity company, said PHP2Shell, as the vulnerability is known, was “now being broadly exploited in the wild” and it had identified several attempts from multiple actors to test ways to capitalise on the vulnerability before the fix was released by the PHP developers on Wednesday.

CloudFlare also said that in the 10 hours before the vulnerability was publicly announced, it saw thousands of attempts to exploit it, amid concern over the handling of the alert. One cybersecurity expert, Prof Alan Woodward, said the flaw was revealed a day before the patch was released, and that “somebody let the cat out of the bag”.’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/22/websites-across-world-hit-by-millions-of-attempts-to-exploit-php-code-flaw