Citing multiple cybersecurity professionals, news agency Reuters reported that the episode is just the beginning. Rapid breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have begun unearthing a stream of hidden software bugs, and cybersecurity leaders warn that the discoveries are certain to trigger waves of disruption in the months ahead. The forecast follows a turbulent week where government agencies and public institutions across Europe, Asia and other regions took government and public portals offline to guard against newly surfaced vulnerabilities in PHP, an open-source programming language that underpins a vast swath of the modern web.
It coincided with an already present cycle of security disclosures and infrastructure incidents across the tech landscape, according to VulnCheck researcher Patrick Garrity. The emergency scramble around PHP did not occur in isolation. Over the same seven-day window critical vulnerabilities were disclosed in Node.js (a popular alternative to PHP) as well as the streaming media platform Plex.