I woke up to panicked text messages about the PHP attacks. As a cybersecurity expert, here are the 3 things I tell people to do right away.

Yonaton Keller is a product manager at Zafran Security and has been working on the exposed PHP vulnerabilities. Courtesy of Yonaton Keller

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yonaton Keller, a 46-year-old product manager at Zafran Security, based in Tel Aviv. His words have been edited for length and clarity.

When I woke up at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday, I had multiple messages from around 4:45 a.m. alerting me that two vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language had been disclosed.

I immediately understood that this was a very serious situation .

Websites run different versions of PHP, and it's estimated that around 70% of websites worldwide use it. This isn't the first time PHP vulnerabilities have been found, but these ones require essentially no authentication on the attacker's part.

It's a very tricky situation.…