What is PHP and why did it spark a global cyber security scramble?
Source: BBC ·
AI uncovered long-hidden programming flaws, triggering a rare global cyber-security response.
From the source
For more than a decade, serious flaws had gone undetected in technology underpinning much of the internet. It took artificial intelligence (AI) to bring them to light and caused a global cyber-security alert. The vulnerabilities lie within a programming language called PHP, which has been used internationally since the 2000s to build websites. Governments and cyber-security agencies around the world scrambled to contain the fallout of this discovery on Wednesday, and have urged website operators to install a new emergency fix or consider taking their platforms offline. Cyber-security firm Wiz - one of the companies whose researchers uncovered the vulnerabilities - described the flaws as the "most severe" ever detected by AI. OpenAI, whose technology was used to find the flaws, called the discovery "one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory". Most people may not have heard of PHP - short for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor - but they most certainly interact with it daily.…