By Sanjay Dubey
On October 21, several government websites and online services around the world went offline. Not because hackers had broken into their systems, but because the organisations running them had deliberately taken them offline. They feared hackers might soon find a way in.
The reason was two serious security flaws in a programming language called PHP. Most internet users have probably never heard of it. Yet it works behind the scenes on a huge number of websites we visit every day.
In India, the government’s cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, identified around 60,000 potentially vulnerable websites, including 303 belonging to government bodies, public-sector organisations and critical sectors.
What made this incident particularly interesting was how weaknesses that had existed in PHP for more than a decade suddenly became such a serious threat.
Artificial intelligence played an important role in this. It helped security researchers uncover these flaws and find ways to exploit them. AI also helped them test possible fixes. But developing, testing and coordinating the release of those fixes took time. Before the fixes could be released, information about the vulnerabilities began to leak, raising fears that hackers might exploit them before websites could be secured. That led several websites to go offline as a precaution…
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