OpenAI · Spain · BBC Technology
The ChatGPT-maker confirmed it had shipped a program to check if the PHP service is secure
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"Many of these flaws stem from the way software were built in the past, which were built for functionality and not with security in mind," said Ryan Ko, at the University of Queensland's Cyber Research Centre.
Key facts
- When you visit a website like Wikipedia, PHP is the code that collects information you need and presents it in a way you can read on the web, Paul Spain, chief executive of Gorilla Cyber Security
- The UK's National Cyber Security Centre gave similar advice and told organisations to check for "backdoors installed by an attacker
- Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged people to check if their publicly available websites ran on PHP
- The US National Security Agency has urged "heightened awareness" in the coming weeks and to closely monitor updates from software vendors
Summary
For more than a decade, serious flaws had gone undetected in the 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 are scrambling to contain the fallout of the 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.