Welcome to Kernel Panic , a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up here .

As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs , criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild. Millions of exploitation attempts hit within hours of the vulnerabilities being published, according to analysis from Cloudflare—unsurprising given broad access to AI tools that can make it easier for attackers to quickly exploit flaws.

So far, the nightmare scenario of mass victim takeovers and breaches hasn’t come to pass. The PHP Foundation says it hasn’t seen any successful exploitation of the bugs, collectively dubbed PHP2Shell, and many publicly circulating potential exploits appear to be ineffective .…