Researchers using AI as part of the Hack the Planet initiative discovered vulnerabilities in PHP, prompting urgent patching advisories for website owners.

Cloud and security providers reported observing millions of exploitation attempts related to the issue, bringing renewed focus to foundational open-source web infrastructure risks.

The issues were discovered by researchers working in a joint initiative between OpenAI and Wiz, who used artificial intelligence to exploit the flaw. PHP is a decades-old technology used to build popular content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal, and is behind about 70% of websites worldwide.

The attacks and the warnings

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said he had seen millions of attack attempts related to the issue, which he called PHP2Shell.…