‘Black October’: cybersecurity experts sound the alarm over new era of AI-enabled hacking

After the discovery of a severe bug in the PHP programming language, executives are warning of a potential "vulnerability tsunami". Leaders in cybersecurity are raising alarms following the identification of a major vulnerability this week, predicting that artificial intelligence tools will expose more fundamental weaknesses in global internet infrastructure in the coming months.

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"I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs," said Sam Altman on Thursday evening, echoing concerns shared by other executives.

This month has been dubbed "Black October" as researchers utilized AI to identify critical flaws in a coding language that powers millions of websites, some of which may have gone unpatched for years. Tech executives are cautioning about the unprecedented scale and pace at which AI will be used to both identify and exploit security vulnerabilities.

Jason Clinton, deputy chief information security officer at Anthropic, stated, "The next few months will see a vulnerability tsunami." He added, "There won’t be enough time to patch critical infrastructure."