AI found a vulnerability that had to disable websites Last week, government agencies and companies in various countries temporarily shut down their websites. The reason was two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language, which neural networks helped to explore. The fixes were published on October 21, but attack attempts were detected even before their publication. what happened PHP is the programming language that powers many online stores, government portals and other systems. The bugs found allow, under certain conditions, to run someone else's code on the server without an administrator password. The researchers also showed that passwords and access keys can be retrieved from memory. The problem is with PHP itself, so even a carefully written website can be vulnerable. How has AI helped? California and Wiz experts used language models to find errors and test attack methods. Neural networks help to understand complex failures, test hypotheses and adapt the attack to different server settings. This reduces the amount of manual work. The developers noticed the first signs of one of the problems as early as 2024. But the specific method of the dangerous attack was not confirmed at the time, and the patches threatened to disrupt the operation of the existing software. The PHP Foundation (the non-governmental organization that supports and funds the language) admits that fixing the bug has been delayed due to a lack of resources and difficulties in making decisions. Why turn off sites? A temporary shutdown buys you time to install fixes. In Russia, according to RBC, the NKTSKI under the FSB has also ordered critical infrastructure organizations to update PHP, and if it can't be done quickly, consider restricting access, up to and including shutdown. AI helps defenders find old bugs, but also speeds up attackers. Therefore, managers have less and less time for "we'll update later". "Bogatyreva about Digital" in Max.