{"id":941787,"date":"2026-10-22T07:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T07:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/941787\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T07:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T07:24:10","slug":"world-leaders-warn-of-security-flaws-found-in-php-programming-language-cybersecurity-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/941787\/","title":{"rendered":"World leaders warn of security flaws found in PHP programming language | Cybersecurity News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence was used to pinpoint two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, used by more than 70 percent of websites.<\/p>\n

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Published On 22 Oct 202622 Oct 2026<\/p>\n

Authorities in Europe, Asia and other continents have temporarily taken some government websites offline to protect against newly discovered security vulnerabilities in a programming language used to power the vast majority of sites on the internet.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language prompted a rare public warning from the United States National Security Agency (NSA), which advised taking websites offline if they could not be updated immediately.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

\u201cEffective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities,\u201d the NSA said in a social media post.<\/p>\n

In Germany, the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation said it took some websites offline as a preventative measure. France\u2019s Ministry of the Interior deactivated the official websites for local administrative offices.<\/p>\n

Authorities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and the Czech Republic also said they had shut down websites to apply a security patch to close the PHP loophole. Even Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted on social media to warn about the PHP risk.<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity experts discovered<\/a> the pair of vulnerabilities, dubbed PHP2Shell, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) models.<\/p>\n

Researchers at security firm Calif, working with OpenAI, reported the first flaw on August 11. Wiz, a security firm owned by tech giant Alphabet, reported the second vulnerability on August 24.<\/p>\n

Wiz said the findings \u201crank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history\u201d.<\/p>\n

The underlying flaws had been present for decades, the firm said, but proving they were exploitable required a chain of steps \u201cat the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve\u201d.<\/p>\n

AI tools let researchers find vulnerabilities in software by testing more attacks than human programmers can alone.<\/p>\n

Volunteers maintain the PHP programming language, and the nonprofit PHP Foundation said on Wednesday that the flaws were among the most severe it had encountered.<\/p>\n

The group urged anyone administering a website to update their code immediately.<\/p>\n

Both flaws rely on accessing parts of memory without proper authorisation and exploiting that access to run malicious code. The two loopholes mean an attacker can remotely run commands on a server running old PHP code over the internet, without needing a password or legitimate account access.<\/p>\n

The PHP Foundation also warned that AI would make such security weaknesses easier to find. It called on tech companies to mount a coordinated response to avoid major disruptions to online services.<\/p>\n

\u201cTools now find bugs faster than ever, for defenders and attackers alike, and the number of reports will keep growing,\u201d the foundation said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence was used to pinpoint two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, used by more than 70…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":941788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5806,19950,283,46,3456,43,44,8143,61,41,39,42,40,772,1690],"class_list":["post-941787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-asia","tag-cybercrime","tag-cybersecurity","tag-economy","tag-europe","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-science-and-technology","tag-technology","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/941788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}