Why AI could threaten much of the world’s digital infrastructure
Volunteer-led PHP, which powers most websites, is increasingly under threat from cyberattacks using AI capabilities.
Earlier this month, authorities worldwide urged website administrators to execute emergency updates after a nonprofit programming foundation flagged critical security flaws that could allow hackers to breach systems.
Government and corporate websites briefly went offline to patch the vulnerabilities, nicknamed PHP2Shell, which were discovered by independent cybersecurity experts using artificial intelligence (AI).
The vulnerabilities were embedded in the code of a widely used open-source web programming language, PHP, for more than a decade. They had gone unnoticed, however, because it would have been too complicated for humans to exploit them without the use of advanced AI.
“We have maybe 10 times more issues than usual because we are using AI to find them,” said Jarek Potiuk, part of the volunteer security team at the Apache Software Foundation. (In keeping with the foundation’s non-hierarchical ethos, Potiuk said he has no real title).