France · Germany · The Guardian Technology
OpenAI said it led a coalition of researchers that discovered the flaw and claimed “frontier AI” had been key
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Cybersecurity company Calif said it found the flaws with the help of a large language model on 1 August and had been working on a fix ever since.
Key facts
- The US National Security Agency told all organisations using PHP to take their systems offline if they were unable to patch them immediately
- AI was powering a “race to exploit”, said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP:Black
- 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%
- The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre gave similar advice and told organisations to check for “backdoors installed by an attacker
Summary
Websites around the globe have gone dark after a serious vulnerability was found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web. 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. The vulnerability in the programming language, which became public on Tuesday, sparked warnings from national security agencies in Washington and London. WordPress, one of the most common website systems, uses PHP, as does Wikipedia, the messaging software Slack and, at least historically, much of Facebook. The organisation behind the language issued a patch on Wednesday after researchers testing cyberdefences discovered the flaw.