Will AI expose the rickety infrastructure of the internet?

A startling announcement went out earlier this week: Due to recently discovered vulnerabilities in the open source programming language PHP, website owners had to immediately patch their sites — or if they couldn’t update right away, they should take the sites down to be safe.

On this week’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the significance of the PHP-ocalypse and whether we’ll see more incidents like this in the future.

Sean called this “a real reckoning moment” that highlights how “when you get down to the bone level of the internet,” everything seems to be “held together by glue and dreams.” And with widespread access to large language models and AI agents, it’s only going to become easier to find these vulnerabilities. (That said, these specific vulnerabilities were found by human researchers, not AI models.)

Kirsten, meanwhile, wondered if we’re about to see the “next level of prepper doom […] because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now.”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Sean O’Kane: The internet is breaking in lots of ways this week, it seems. 

I think the best way to think about this, if people are coming into this kind of cold: How many times over the last 10 years have we had these moments where something breaks or something nearly breaks, where one person maintaining one tiny repro repository as a hobby or whatever happens to catch that something nefarious is going on and and saves us from the infrastructure of the internet completely crumbling? 

Now multiply that by a billion, when people have access to not only extremely advanced software in the form of these LLMs that everybody uses, but also the ability to task them to go out and do it themselves, with creating AI agents that are single-minded at accomplishing those things. 

We’re seeing a balance of two things happening this week. One is a bunch of the labs and companies like Google and OpenAI actually had people go out and find a bunch of vulnerabilities, including the one with PHP. And then we also have a bunch of people seeming to rush to take advantage of those vulnerabilities to try and hack into websites. So we have governments taking down websites, we have really popular websites that are going down briefly to be able to fix this vulnerability.

This is a real reckoning moment, where we’re going to find out the downside risk of building so much of the internet on open source technology like PHP. When you really get down to the bone level of the internet, it is held together with glue and dreams. 

Anthony Ha: There’s so many things that were striking about this. One of them is the fact that — as I understand it, at least — this is not a new vulnerability. This is a vulnerability that has existed in PHP for decades.

And PHP has been used as a programming language to build so much of the web, so this vulnerability has been there for decades, but no one knew about it. What happened is, essentially, that these big AI companies — including Wiz, now owned by Google — they were able to find these vulnerabilities using LLMs. [As noted above, I got this wrong: Human researchers participating in OpenAI and Wiz’s Hack the Planet initiative found the vulnerabilities, though they used AI to exploit the bug.]

I guess part of the calculation is, we need to patch this, because if we can find this vulnerability using LLMs, so can other people. But the only way we can get the patch out there is to announce the vulnerability. And so it creates this very panicked situation where [they say]: “Okay, this vulnerability existed for decades. You have to patch right away, and if you can’t patch it right away, just take your website down. It’s that severe a vulnerability.”

Kirsten Korosec: I think that the important thing is, a lot of people don’t even realize that their websites have PHP — which is this, as you mentioned, decades-old open source programming language. 

For those who don’t know, Hypertext Preprocessor is the official term, [it’s] this really the core ingredient behind content management systems that are used throughout WordPress, Drupal, something like 70% of websites. We’re talking tens of millions of websites. So to me, it’s the scale. It also made me immediately think two things: One, this is just the beginning. What other decades-old bad software is out there that is going to be exploited?

And the other one was something that 404 Media, which had a really great breakdown, mentioned, which is link rot. Because a lot of people, companies, governments, maybe that small neighborhood website, they’re shutting these [websites] down. And so we’re going to have so much link rot and also websites that maybe had a little piece of history out there that aren’t gonna be accessible anymore, as opposed to patching it.

Sean: Anthony, I think you made a really good point. I’ve seen a lot of people unhappy with the disclosure rollout here, a bit of the chest beating that OpenAI seems to have done in its post about it.

Also, it seems like a couple people got ahead of the embargo of this release, which set off a race among the hacker set. I think it was Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince [who] already posted about seeing it escalate to millions of attempted hacks of the PHP2Shell.

The thing with these vulnerabilities, the way in cybersecurity this typically works is, if you’re you’re stress testing a company’s software, even if it’s a fundamental piece of software that helps run a lot of different computers or parts of the internet or whatever it might be, you can go to that company and and disclose it and it sort of stays within that bubble. But when we’re talking about something that’s as deep as and as fundamental as this, you can’t go around and tell everybody discreetly. 

I mean, maybe you could, if the AI was advanced enough and you could task a billion agents to go send an email to every single person who has control over some part of a website. We are now rueing the days when we had webmasters who were easily identifiable, and maybe that would have solved the problem to some extent. But there’s just no easy way to do this. I think this is the beginning of what’s going to be a lot of back and forth and clearly a new frontier in cybersecurity.

Kirsten: Matthew Prince’s social media post was to me really telling, and pretty scary. Also, I don’t know if either of you saw this, but Amazon also put out a blog post. This is a very well-capitalized company, so they have the tools and a team to sort of catch what’s going on. They operate, basically, a honeypot network, or a decoy, and they actually saw that there were attempts to exploit that vulnerability before it had been publicly announced. 

To me, again, it goes back to this: Amazon has the tools and the capital and the know-how to fight these things. There’s so many websites and even potentially government websites that just don’t have that level of attention. And so to me, that’s really the scary part. 

And there [are] some AI employees out there that are probably going to take this to the next level of like prepper doom, because you could see how banks could get exploited, and [with] data and privacy concerns, it just feels a lot bigger than we can fix right now. So I’m interested to see two things. One, how extreme people’s behavior gets — but also I’m wondering if some new startups are going to pop up as a result of this, or if we’re going to be turning to some of the open source tools [offered by companies like Nvidia] to create these security layers.