A startling announcement went out earlier this week: due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites — or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe. On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether we’ll see more incidents like this in the future.
The PHP Vulnerability
Sean called this “a real reckoning moment” that highlights how “when you get down to the bone level of the internet,” everything seems to be “held together by glue and dreams.” With widespread access to large language models and AI agents, it’s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. However, it’s important to note that these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.
Kirsten wondered if we’re about to see the “next level of prepper doom” due to potential exploits of banks and growing data and privacy concerns.
Context of the Situation
Sean O’Kane remarked, “The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week.” He emphasized that over the last decade, there have been numerous instances where vulnerabilities were discovered by individuals maintaining small repositories, preventing potential disasters. Now, with advanced software and AI, the stakes are much higher.
