The PHP security incident is now (almost) old news. The timeline looks something like this : In late August, Wiz Research discovered two serious remote code execution vulnerabilities in PHP called PHP2Shell. They reported the vulnerabilities to the PHP team on August 24, which started working on fixes on September 21. Amazon apparently detected PHP2Shell in the wild on October 17 (four days prior to disclosure). On October 20, details of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) were leaked prematurely. The next day, October 21, the PHP team released patches.

If that were the end of the story, it wouldn’t be notable. But the problem goes a lot deeper. Although PHP is no longer fashionable, it runs a huge portion of the public internet. WordPress, Drupal, and Wikimedia run on top of PHP, and people who build on top of these tools are understandably not interested in chasing the latest hot technology.…