From controlai.org
On Tuesday, in an anonymous post on an internet forum, we got the first warning about what some are calling one of the most serious families of software vulnerabilities ever discovered.
Hours later, the PHP Foundation announced that two critical vulnerabilities had been discovered in PHP, a programming language used in an estimated 70% of websites worldwide. It said an emergency security upgrade wouldn’t be available until the next day.
On Wednesday we learned the full seriousness of the problem: these bugs put any server running PHP at risk of being hacked. That’s huge swathes of the internet, and PHP is baked into web software all over the place. For example, an estimated 40% of websites use WordPress, due to its ease of use, and it relies on PHP.