Websites shut down globally after AI finds cybersecurity flaw affecting 70% of the internet

Governments and companies around the world are racing to fix vulnerabilities revealed by artificial intelligence that could affect 70% of the world’s websites. Some websites and services briefly went dark after the set of vulnerabilities were announced Wednesday. The US National Security Agency and Europe’s cybersecurity agency advised companies to take immediate action to address two critical flaws in PHP, a programming language that powers 70% of the world’s websites. The flaws in PHP were uncovered and addressed by teams at OpenAI, Google-owned cybersecurity company Wiz, and another cybersecurity company, Calif. The underlying flaws had existed for a decade, but exploiting them involved a complex set of steps “at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve,” according to Wiz. Researchers then deployed AI to adapt techniques for taking advantage of those vulnerabilities – known as as “exploits” in cybersecurity – and analyze the results. The bugs, collectively called PHP2Shell, could allow attackers to break into websites and read memory that could contain sensitive information, like passwords. The PHP Foundation, the organization behind the coding language, has released a patch for the bugs, which have been hidden in their software for years, and is urging website operators to update their systems immediately. The CEO of Cloudflare said on X that his company’s network has observed millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerabilities in the past couple of days. “With PHP behind such a vast share of the web, the exposure could reach almost everywhere people spend money online,” said Nigel Green, the CEO of deVere Group, a financial advisory firm. “Booking platforms, marketplaces, subscription services, ticketing sites, delivery apps and utility portals could all be holding card details on systems built with the same kind of code,” he added. ‘AI inflection point’ The vulnerabilities involve an issue with how the PHP language works with a computer’s memory. When a website request unexpectedly ends, PHP could leave data behind in the memory that can be accessed and potentially corrupted or exposed later. The flaws could allow attackers to remotely execute code, disrupt services and expose customer data, according to web infrastructure provider Cloudflare, which has been working with the PHP Foundation, Calif, OpenAI and Wiz to address the issue. “Think of a hotel room where you check out, but your key still works,” Patrick Fussell, global head of adversary simulation at IBM, told CNN. “And so you can just go back into that hotel room later, and now somebody else’s stuff is there.” The bugs were discovered in late August but were disclosed to the public only on Wednesday, after PHP had come up with a fix. AI played a crucial role in identifying and fixing vulnerabilities “that had remained hidden in the PHP codebase for more than a decade,” according to Wiz. The company called PHP the “backbone of the web” and said the episode marks an AI inflection point. “What AI changed was the ability to understand the weaknesses,” Wiz researchers wrote in a blog post Wednesday, and then quickly exploit those weaknesses into a way to attack. “With frontier AI models and the right tools, a single researcher completed in a week what previously would have taken a world-class team months of work,” they added. Researchers at Wiz used Google’s Gemini 4 Argon, Wiz Atlas and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol during the research process. World leaders weigh in Global leaders urged organizations to take action. Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten said that his cabinet was “closely monitoring the situation surrounding the vulnerabilities in PHP.” Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said companies should consider suspending services if necessary in order to reduce their exposure. “Please check if your publicly available websites use PHP, and prepare to apply the fix patch that will be released tonight… as soon as possible,” she posted on X Wednesday. Japanese airline ANA, railway operator JR West and the country’s largest bank, MUFG, were among companies that reported some webpages and services temporarily suspended. In Europe, government websites in France, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands, including the Dutch cyber security agency, were temporarily taken offline while security fixes were implemented. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, told CNN Thursday that it was “in the process of addressing security vulnerabilities in PHP,” and that a number of its systems had been taken down as a “precautionary measure.” Nearly three dozen UK government services are unavailable and four are “partially unavailable” while security upgrades take place, UK government minister Elizabeth Lloyd told the House of Lords Thursday. The Journal, Ireland’s second most-popular news outlet, was temporarily offline Thursday morning while it bolstered its “defences,” it said in a notice. A shift in cybersecurity Wiz researchers say the issue is on par with the Heartbleed bug from 2014, which impacted an encryption technology estimated to be used by some two-thirds of the Web. Heartbleed allowed cybercriminals to access data that should have been protected. Like Heartbleed, the researchers at Wiz say PHP2Shell could similarly serve as a turning point in cybersecurity. While the vulnerabilities existed for years, AI made it practical to deploy them. “The speed with which vulnerabilities are being discovered is well beyond what it ever was before,” said Fussell. Even though a patch has been released, it’s likely that not all companies and organizations will update their systems at the same time, according to Gang Wang, associate professor of computer science at the University of Illinois. That could give bad actors a window to exploit it now that the vulnerability has been made public – and they can now do so faster using AI. But taking advantage of the vulnerability is no easy task, even with the help of AI, according to Fussell. “This is being touted as like, ‘Hey, you can push a button and basically take over a server type of thing,’” he said. “…To actually pull this off requires a couple of conditions that are actually fairly complex and not always going to work out in favor of somebody who’s trying to go and exploit this bug.” By Lisa Eadicicco, Hanna Ziady

AI Agents Are Breaking the Internet. 5 Things You Should Do Right Now to Protect Yourself

A thing we’re learning more and more is that much of the internet runs on technology that’s been around for decades. Sure, the websites and apps we use every day look very different from what they did 20 years ago, but a lot of the underlying infrastructure hasn’t actually changed that much at all. And, as it turns out, a lot of that infrastructure is more fragile than you might think. Last week was a pretty good reminder. First, researchers disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers roughly 70 percent of websites. According to experts, the flaws could allow attackers to take complete control of vulnerable servers without even needing a password. AI played an important role in identifying and validating the vulnerabilities. That’s great, but the same technology that finds bugs can also be used by people trying to exploit them faster than companies can fix them. Then, security researchers disclosed that they had discovered compromised encryption keys belonging to an Indian company responsible for issuing TLS certificates. Those certificates help browsers know that the sites they connect to are actually what they say they are. So, when you visit the URL for your bank, you’re actually giving your login and password to your bank, not some phishing scam. The problem is, the encryption keys were based on a single digit, not a 256-bit key. Anyone with those keys could impersonate almost any website, at least until browsers stopped trusting the affected certificates. To be clear, there’s not much you can do personally about vulnerabilities in PHP or compromised security certificates. There are, however, a handful of relatively simple things everyone should do right now to protect their information. 1. Use a password manager Everyone hates remembering passwords, which is why far too many people use the same simple password for all kinds of websites. That’s a huge problem, and using a password manager that can safely store unique passwords is probably the single most important thing you can do to protect your information online. A password manager creates a unique, hard-to-remember password for every account and then remembers it so you don’t have to. That means if one website gets hacked, criminals can’t simply use that same password to access your email, bank, or other accounts. Apple’s Passwords app and Google’s Password Manager are built into their respective platforms. There are also excellent options like 1Password that make it easy to share access to login credentials across families or teams. Even better, use passkeys whenever they’re available. I realize a lot of people resist passkeys because they don’t understand, but they’re far easier to use than passwords and virtually impossible to steal through phishing. 2. Turn on two-factor authentication Even strong passwords aren’t entirely secure. If someone does get your password, they have access to your account unless you turn on two-factor authentication (2FA). You’re probably most familiar with entering six-digit codes via text message after you log into a website. That’s 2FA. The whole point is that your password isn’t enough—you have to have access to a second factor to gain access to the account or website. You can also use an authenticator app, but receiving a code by text message is better than having no protection at all. At a minimum, you should definitely enable it for your email and Apple Account. Your email is the way someone could reset passwords for everything else, and your Apple (or Google) Account has pretty much all your personal information and photos. 3. Pay attention to which apps have access to your information As AI agents become more common, a lot of people are connecting them to their Gmail, cloud storage, and other sources of data. That’s super useful, but you’ve basically given your AI tool permission to access information you probably would prefer be kept private. Depending on the permissions you enable, your AI agent might even be able to modify files, send messages, or take other actions on your behalf. That’s incredibly useful, but it also means that there is a risk. It’s worth taking a few minutes to check all of the applications connected to your most important accounts. Turn off anything you don’t recognize or don’t use anymore. And don’t give an AI agent permission to do something it doesn’t actually need to do. 4. Turn on automatic updates I get it, software updates are annoying. I don’t know anyone who enjoys updating their computer or iPhone, especially since it seems that the only time either wants to update its software is when I sit down to do something important. Still, making sure you are up-to-date is one of the easiest ways to protect yourself. Security issues are constantly being discovered, and software updates are how companies fix vulnerabilities. In fact, the PHP flaws disclosed last week are a perfect example of why keeping software updated matters. Make sure your phone, computer, and browser install security updates automatically. It might be the simplest thing that can protect you without requiring you to think about it again. 5. Be skeptical of anything asking for your information AI has pretty much removed all friction when it comes to creating convincing emails, text messages, and even phone calls that appear to come from someone you know and trust. Partly that’s because its good at looking at real human writing and producing reasonable messages that sound like they’re actually coming from another person. As a general rule, you should never click on unexpected links asking you to sign in or provide financial information. If you do get an email that you think is real, open the company’s app or website directly. And if you’re using an AI agent, require your approval before it sends messages, makes purchases, or changes important information. Obviously, none of these things are going to make you completely immune to sophisticated attacks. That’s especially true when many of the most critical issues are in software and systems you don’t have any control over. But these five steps are things you can control, and that’s the point. As AI agents become more capable, the internet is going to become an increasingly complicated place to keep information secure. There’s not a lot you can do about that, but the good news is that there are little things you can do that go a long way toward keeping your information safe. EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN

Want AI to Make You Smarter, Not Dumber? Research Says Make This Simple Change

If you’re inclined to worry that leaning on AI might be making us dumber, there are plenty of studies indicating you’re right to be concerned. Researchers have found handing off thinking and ideating to AI can lead to “cognitive atrophy” or “cognitive surrender.” Translation: You forget how to do core skills and end up dumber. On the other hand, just about every business thinker under the sun is also issuing urgent warnings to learn to use AI to become more productive or your career is toast. So how do you square these two seemingly irreconcilable truths? Is there a way to use AI not just for basic admin but also for the thinking and judging parts of your job and end up smarter rather than with brain rot? Yup, suggests at least one AI researcher who has studied these questions extensively. All you need to do, according to UMass Amherst’s Monideepa Tarafdar, is make one important flip in how you use these tools. Ask AI to make your job harder, not easier The first instinct of most people, when presented with a shiny new AI tool, is to ask it how to do their work better and faster. Generate some ideas for me to evaluate, you might say, or suggest resources that would help me think through this problem. Slap together this presentation or poster. The aim is to use these tools to make our jobs easier. But recent research from Tarafdar and her colleagues suggests that, if you want Claude, Gemini, and the like to end up boosting rather than sapping your intelligence, you should aim for the exact opposite. Rather than try to get the bots to make your job easier, you should ask them to make it (temporarily) harder. Good friction leads to stronger work “We found that when knowledge workers intentionally use AI to challenge their ideas—to generate friction—they can significantly improve their performance,” Tarafdar recently wrote on Greater Good, summing up her team’s findings. What does that look like in practice? One marketing professional in the researchers studied asked AI to create virtual customer personas who would dislike her product. The exercise revealed preferences and problems no one had considered before. An attorney asked a chatbot to search for obscure legal loopholes. “That exposed surprising but realistic scenarios of hard-to-detect unethical behavior in employees,” Tarafdar reports. Another operations professional asked AI to suggest technologies from other fields that might apply to his own work. The suggestions were unfamiliar, requiring research and critical judgment to evaluate, but they also ended up being highly useful. In all these instances, rather than smoothing the path for these professionals, AI threw up difficulties, roadblocks, challenged assumptions, and suggested possibilities they hadn’t previously considered. Did that make more work for them? In the short term, yes. But it also made the end product of their work stronger and better. The role of leaders Using AI as a sparring partner doesn’t come naturally to many people. Most of us, in general, try to make our lives easier, not harder. But when AI is used to offload difficulty, the result is often not just weaker work, but a weaker brain. That’s why leaders need to actively encourage employees to use these new tools to introduce rather than eliminate friction. Nearly every organization is encouraging their people to experiment with AI these days. Adapting these nudges to specifically suggest employees ask the bots to challenge their thinking, poke holes in the ideas, or seek out perspectives they may have overlooked is a relatively simple tweak that can pay big dividends. “An important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you,” Tarafdar stresses. AI-induced brain rot is a real fear. But it is not inevitable. The right approach, one that views AI as a tough coach rather than a sycophantic intern, can actually end up making you smarter. But you need to prompt yourself and your people to actually use it that way. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN

The biggest-ever internet security threat has been known for 22 years. AI made it a crisis in 2 days

In July 2004, security researcher Stefan Esser sent a warning. A critical flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers 70% of the world’s websites, could allow an attacker to do some seriously nefarious stuff: read passwords, steal databases or even take over entire websites. But Esser’s warning went mostly ignored for decades. In 2020, another researcher discovered a related problem, and the PHP overseers issued a partial fix. A similar PHP vulnerability was uncovered in 2024 – but was left unfixed. Why was one of the most severe threats to the foundation of the internet left unresolved for 22 years? Because it would have taken mind-numbing work for a human to figure out how to take advantage of it: tedious, time-consuming, monotonous coding. That rendered the PHP vulnerability impractical to exploit. AI just figured out how to do it in two days. On Wednesday, OpenAI’s public revelation of the exploit was announced in conjunction with a security update to fix the problem. Phew, you might think. The good guys got to it first. But the AI-assisted discovery deeply concerned cybersecurity researchers, because the next one might come from someone who wants to weaponize it. And AI doesn’t care who’s pulling the trigger. Security by exhaustion The internet is held together with shoestring and bubblegum. An apt xkcd cartoon visualizes “all modern digital infrastructure” as a giant Jenga tower supported by one, thin, vertical block with the label: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” On July 30, researchers at AI security company Calif, in conjunction with OpenAI’s new Patch the Planet security initiative, decided to point a large-language AI model at one of those Jenga blocks – PHP – and see what came of it. It didn’t expect to find anything critical. On August 1, it found a method to attack PHP’s vulnerabilities. Days later, it found another. Then another. Later that month, Google-backed security company Wiz – another Patch the Planet participant – discovered new exploits for PHP vulnerabilities, too. The patch went out Wednesday, and the companies publicly disclosed their findings. Wiz called it one of the most severe vulnerabilities in software history. The security community lit up social media with I-told-you-sos. “The security industry has long been warning about the coming security apocalypse, because AI can do these things very, very quickly – better than humans,” said Vyas Sekar, professor of computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “This may be the first of many. This is a wakeup call.” Sekar says there are more PHP-like vulnerabilities out there to discover and exploit. A lot more. Some are known, and many are unknown. The wide availability of AI tools has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for hackers to take advantage of potential security vulnerabilities. That fact freaked out Anthropic enough that the AI company paused deployment of its Mythos model in June, as it was so good at exposing security vulnerabilities and finding vectors for attack that the US government labeled it a national security threat. But Calif researcher Ryan Austin noted in a blog post that the company didn’t use any special AI models that weren’t generally available to the public. That democratization of AI tools made clear that “security by exhaustion” is no longer a viable safeguard against bad guys, said Nick Rogers, CEO of Fieldwork AI. For 22 years, PHP was like a bank with no security guards. Anyone could walk down to the vault and make off with the cash – if they had the time to try every code. It was such arduous work, it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. But AI doesn’t get tired. And it can crack safes way faster than humans. “Taking a theoretical (vulnerability) and proving you can exploit it is quite tedious and mechanical work,” said Rogers. “AI can keep churning until it figures it out. You don’t even need to try. You can drink coffee while it does it.” The vulnerability Effectively, PHP is an engine that powers most of the internet. Until it was patched Wednesday, it had a fatal flaw. A vulnerability left open a patch for an attacker to mess around with the way PHP processes requests to run websites. If a server crashed because it ran out of memory, it would leave stale data behind that could be exploited to leak the data or execute bad code. Think of the exploit like taking advantage of a busy restaurant kitchen. Customers could overwhelm the chef with too many complex orders – so much that she quits midway through dinner, leaving dirty pans, raw ingredients and recipes strewn about the counter. Then, when a new chef is hired, he serves the contaminated food on filthy dishes – and even sends some recipes to customers along with their dinner orders. Although the vulnerability was long known to be theoretically exploitable, figuring out how to do it proved exceedingly difficult. Hackers had to force the server into an out-of-memory crash at a specific instant to bypass PHP’s safety limits. When researchers pointed AI at the problem, it quickly found a couple ways around that. One solution exploits a mismatch between the way PHP measures compressed files and decoded files. Effectively, it allowed compressed files through its gates, letting the file unpack itself and take over from the inside. Another attacks PHP with deeply nested file structures that overwhelmed PHP’s directory structure, triggering the memory failure. The vulnerability was patched, but the threat may not be over, noted Adam Meyers, vice president of counter adversary at security company CrowdStrike. Many outdated versions of PHP are still in use, and the patch almost certainly didn’t fix all of PHP’s problems. Also, an apparent leak about the vulnerability before the patch was released resulted in thousands of exploits in the hours ahead of the announcement, according to security company Cloudflare. “Bad guys don’t need to find the vulnerability first – they can weaponize it after the fact,” Meyers said. “We are still waiting to see how much of this shows up in the wild.” What’s next? OpenAI offered several suggestions in its disclosure about the PHP patch, all of which basically boil down to: Write better, more secure code from the start. That’s not super helpful if your web application has been written using PHP. “Migrating away from PHP is a pretty expensive process,” noted Meyers. “It’s not like switching from Microsoft mail to Google mail; you need to rebuild the whole application.” If the solution isn’t to migrate 70% of the web to a new programming language, then fixing its underlying problems – and all the other software problems in the world – would hardly be an easy fix, either. What’s needed, then, may be a paradigm shift in the way the security community operates. Effectively, assume everything poses a security risk. Companies need to treat every single business operation like air traffic controllers treat their surroundings, said Madhu Shashanka, cofounder of security company Concentric AI. “Everything is a potential vulnerability,” Shashanka said. “Every business operation is a high-stakes operation.” For example, companies that leave certain software unpatched – even for a few days – are exposing themselves to vulnerabilities that are no longer too difficult or expensive for bad actors to exploit. “Lots of vulnerabilities are out there that are never exploited because it takes effort,” said Shashanka. “AI has rendered that effort meaningless.” Analysis by David Goldman