00:00Countless online services from Wikipedia to Pokemon Champions went dark yesterday,
00:04and plenty more are still offline. But don't worry, this isn't the death of the internet,
00:08yet. The reasons behind the blackout are a pair of critical vulnerabilities recently discovered in
00:13PHP by AI, a hugely popular programming language relied on by an estimated 70% of web services
00:20all over the world, including those from news organisations, businesses and governments.
00:24The flaws open the door to major remote attacks which could include website takeovers, massive
00:28data theft or malicious redirects among other seriously sinister situations. The plan was to
00:33keep the vulnerability hidden until right before a patch was ready, but the news leaks early, and
00:38platforms like Amazon Threat Intelligence detected exploitation attempts ahead of the news breaking.
00:43Thankfully a patch is now available, which is why numerous websites went down unexpectedly over the
00:47last 24 hours so they could install the fixes. However, cyber security experts are urging sites
00:52that haven't yet patched their PHP code to take their websites down ASAP and stay offline until
00:57fixes can be made, with the likes of Siggy Goode, a professor of information systems at the
01:02Australian National University warning users that the sites that went offline aren't the big issue
01:06here, it's the websites that are not down which are clear targets for hackers. The other bad news is
01:11it's likely we'll see more of these blackouts going forwards. AI is proving excellent at discovering code
01:16vulnerabilities, and while the best frontier models are restricted for this very reason, eventually they
01:21do release to the public, and it just takes one floor to remain hidden until then, or to be leaked
01:26to
01:26malicious actors if it is found early for things to go seriously wrong.
