• All hell broke loose this week after a security flaw in 70% of the world's websites was made public.
• It was supposed to be kept under wraps as a fix was deployed, but one researcher jumped the gun.
• Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc told POLITICO why he decided to go public.

The exposure was immense, with AI multiplying the risks — and yet time-tested global cybersecurity procedures appeared to be functioning. Then suddenly, it all broke down.

The decision by a cybersecurity company on Wednesday to prematurely release information about a flaw in the popular PHP computer programming language left much of the web exposed to hackers, triggering a panic that brought to life months of warnings of how the AI-powered era could cause widespread damage.

The flaws in PHP, discovered using AI tools through a monthslong process coordinated by OpenAI, caused cyber agencies across Europe, the US, the UK, Australia and Canada to post urgent warnings Wednesday. Numerous governments took websites offline as a precaution.

While no major hacking damage was immediately apparent, the way the incident unfolded over 72 hours showed how easily cybersecurity processes can break down and the outsized consequences of cyber risks in the AI era.

The man who set off the chain reaction with the early release — Chainguard's CEO Dan Lorenc — quickly apologized in a LinkedIn post. But on Thursday, in an interview with POLITICO, Lorenc said he'd shared the information ahead of time because the flaw was already being exploited. Though others disputed that, Lorenc said he believed he'd seen enough evidence to invalidate an embargo set up to allow time to find a fix for the flaws.

While he disputed that his actions would have caused problems for other defenders, Lorenc said that the evidential threshold in these coordinated cyber defense systems is a "grey area."

The revelation of the PHP flaw brings out into the open what cyber officials have been bracing for since the arrival of the most powerful tools of artificial intelligence, which not only can be used to discover vulnerabilities but also to exploit them at scale.

The cybersecurity world's long-established protocols helped prevent disaster scenarios in which hackers would have successfully exploited the vulnerabilities to take control of numerous websites and access their data. But the scale and end-of-days potential of AI-driven cyber risks are now visible for the world to see.

This "is what happens when AI turns up a flaw that's been hiding for years," said Eylam Milner, cofounder and chief technology officer at cybersecurity startup Echo. The vulnerabilities, he added, are "about as serious as it gets for the web."

Origin story

Understanding how this week's emergency unfolded offers a glimpse at how companies and authorities are working to stave off attacks — and how much risk they face going forward.

The origins of the incident can be traced back as far as April, when leading frontier AI firm Anthropic unveiled Mythos, leading some in the cybersecurity world to worry that systems would quickly be overrun by advanced artificial intelligence, with potential for catastrophic events to ensue.

But while researchers did find more flaws in computer systems in the months after Anthropic and other AI firms like OpenAI released those models, they had little impact in the real world. Even the Hugging Face incident, a widely discussed hack that saw OpenAI's autonomous AI agents go rogue during an internal security evaluation, related more to the level of control AI companies exert over their models than their power to break into systems worldwide.

That changed this week after researchers unveiled the vulnerability in PHP, a coding language estimated to be integrated into some 70% of the web.

The process by which information about flaws is released among cybersecurity officials and affiliated companies is crucial. Through a long-standing practice known as coordinated disclosure, researchers and companies that identify flaws can find a fix and share it confidentially with agencies and others before releasing it to the public, meaning they don't hand malicious hackers the gift of a hole without a fix.

In the case of the PHP flaw, that process worked well, but not perfectly. Information about the bugs started to circulate ahead of the planned release time. Then, according to the PHP Foundation, Chainguard "unilaterally broke the embargo," which "disregarded weeks of work by many parties toward a coordinated disclosure." PHP Foundation executive director Elizabeth Barron told POLITICO by email that while it was "disappointed" with Chainguard, it hopes to "rebuild trust with them in the future to ensure we can continue to collaborate effectively."

After the leak — which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves.

Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, which gives it a high level of visibility into what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen "millions" of attempts to exploit the flaw.

Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.

Amazon's cloud division also said the flaw is "now being broadly exploited in the wild."

One senior US government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle.

"The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once," the official said, adding: "The good news is they're all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day."

More to come

Dauntingly, OpenAI said there's more on the way. "These bugs are among several significant vulnerabilities we've already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months," the company said Wednesday in a statement.

Matthijs van Amelsfort, head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, said in an interview that the job of keeping computer systems safe has been transformed by the advancement of AI. "As soon as the frontier models came out, that's exactly what we said: This will be the trend," he said. "And actually that's happening now."

Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany's cyber agency BSI, concurred: "We expect that [to be] happening more and more during the coming months."

AI also ramps up the risks once the flaws are out in the open. Cyber agencies' recommendation that organizations take their websites offline was "really a drastic measure," Caspers said. "We wouldn't have done that a few years ago or so." But because AI has made it quicker and easier to exploit flaws, "we had to do that," he said.

At the same time, the use of advanced AI to detect the flaws may create a new level of protection against malicious hackers looking to take advantage of them. Caspers said that though his German agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers.

"It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit," he said.

Despite the fact that AI offers a new way to discover flaws, the work involved in keeping systems protected is more quotidian, with cyber agencies urging organizations to install the fix shared by the PHP Foundation, in a process known as patching.

"There are three things that you have to do right now," said van Amelsfort from the Dutch agency. "And that's patch, patch, and patch."

John Sakellariadis contributed to this report.

The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company's newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, The Telegraph, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.

• Jen Eaves' mother is 79 and lost more than $3,000 to online scams.
• Eaves now monitors her mother's finances and says that was a hard conversation.
• Digital caregiving is an important part of supporting aging parents, she says.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jen Eaves, Digital Caregiving & Elder Fraud Advocate at Aura. It has been edited for length and clarity.

It's an odd shift in dynamic when you start caring for the people who always cared for you. My mother is 79, and lives with my brother, who handles most of her day-to-day physical care. I'm the one who handles the administrative side of care, like scheduling doctor appointments and keeping her safe online.

About six years ago, my mom had a stroke, and while she recovered fairly well, she wasn't the same cognitively as she had been before. Around that time, I began noticing her falling for scams online.

Once, she ordered a cure for diabetes, which she has. The product was supposedly being sold by a famous TV doctor. When she showed me the video ad, I could see it was badly done AI, with the supposed doctor's lips not matching his words.

There have been other scams and pitfalls, too: online orders that never arrive, or even a legitimate credit card that my mom opened without realizing what she was doing. All in all, she's lost about $3,000 to scams, though I've been able to recover most of it through her bank.

I've realized that I need to take a more proactive approach to digital caregiving to protect my mom's finances. Here's what I'm doing.

Approaching from a place of help and dignity

After my brother and I had taken my mom's keys away, her phone became her connection to the world. I wanted to respect that. While some people have to restrict their older parents' access to phones, that didn't feel right in my case.

It was critical to me that my mom kept her dignity and as much independence as possible. At the same time, I saw there was an emotional side to falling for a scam: she would feel frustrated and confused when it happened, and I wanted to spare her those negative emotions.

I never want my mom to feel like I'm parenting her. Instead, I pointed out the patterns I was seeing and emphasized I'm here to help if she's willing to let me be involved. The choice, ultimately, is hers. This would be a lot harder if she wasn't willing.

Talk about scams

My mom wasn't particularly tech savvy, even before her stroke. I've had to educate her about what scams look like. When she shared the famous doctor video, I pointed out the aspects that seemed AI-generated to me. I remind her that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I emphasize that urgency is a big sign of a scam. The bank, I tell her, is never going to call you.

Once, she had a scam caller claiming to be Apple support. They asked for her Apple ID and password, which would have given them access to pretty much everything she has online.

Because of our conversations, my mom hesitated. She patched me into the call and asked the scammer to explain the situation to me. I was very proud that she recognized the scam and knew to ask me for help.

I monitor my mom's accounts

I worked in cybersecurity at Aura, which offers a lot of great products for keeping kids safe online. But my experience with my mom made me realize we were missing a whole vulnerable population: older adults.

I helped develop Trusted Family Access, which allows family members like me to see alerts from their loved ones' accounts, with permission. This gives me peace of mind that I can catch any issues quickly. It's also made other aspects of caregiving easier, like handling medical appointments, because I have access to all my mom's information in one place.

When my mom was scammed, it felt like I was a victim too. I spent hours calling her bank and credit cards to get her money back. If she were to lose her savings, it would impact the whole family. I'm grateful we've found a solution that empowers both of us to keep her finances safe.

• Everyone complains about AI-generated junk.
• But decades of sloppy human-written software may be a much bigger problem.
• This week's "Black October" freakout was caused by human slop, not AI.

The internet has a slop problem. And for once, we can't blame AI.

Most of us spend hours online every day without thinking much about the software holding everything together. We assume somebody, somewhere, has made sure it all works properly.

So it probably came as a shock this week to discover just how vulnerable some of that software is.

The cybersecurity freakout dubbed "Black October" has inspired warnings about AI-powered hackers, digital catastrophe, and even advice to stockpile cash and canned food.

At first glance, AI looks like the villain. But this is largely a human-made mess.

Here's the problem.

The internet runs on decades of software, some of it containing security weaknesses that have been overlooked, tolerated, or simply left unfixed.

For years, that was a manageable gamble. Fixing software takes time and money. Exploiting obscure weaknesses often required considerable expertise. Companies could convince themselves that the risk wasn't worth worrying about.

AI is changing that calculation. Someone who once needed years of training to hunt for weaknesses can now get help from an AI model. These tools can also examine software at speeds that humans can't match.

Suddenly, all those problems we've been ignoring look more urgent.

"Over the last 10 years the risk acceptance process has morphed from a way to accept risks to enable the business, to a way to justify never fixing security issues," Joel de la Garza and Zane Lackey, partners at a16z, wrote on Friday.

That's quite an indictment. The result is a recent surge in published vulnerabilities.

This looks like AI is creating new security problems. But it's actually AI exposing weaknesses that humans left behind.

Slop irony

The irony is delicious. We've spent the past couple of years complaining about "AI slop." Turns out human slop can be pretty consequential, too.

"The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it's actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up," software engineer Ben Kaufman wrote on X on Thursday.

"Humans have been the ones writing and reviewing each other's code for decades," tech founder Anant Jain wrote on X. "If we're being intellectually honest and holding ourselves to the same bar we hold AI to, we'd have to admit that we haven't been all that good at it either."

Humans are sloppy

Anyone who's worked with other humans for a decade or two knows exactly how this happens.

It's Friday afternoon. You've almost finished a project. You could spend another few hours making it perfect, or declare it 90% done and head off to that dinner party. We've all been there.

AI agents don't have dinner parties. They don't get tired on Friday afternoons. They can keep searching, testing, and trying again. That persistence is now colliding with an internet built by busy, imperfect humans who often settled for "good enough for now."

A tragedy of the commons

There's another wrinkle here, though, and it's an important one.

Much of the software underpinning the internet is freely available for anyone to use. Some of it is maintained by volunteers or small groups of experts, even as enormous technology companies depend on it.

In 2020, the cartoonist Randall Munroe captured this absurdity in an xkcd comic. Modern digital infrastructure still rests precariously on tiny foundations.

It's funny because it's uncomfortably close to reality. Take the specific PHP problems from this week. These flaws have existed for years, and the PHP Foundation acknowledges that limited resources and disagreements over fixes contributed to delays in fixing them.

Tom Occhino, chief product officer at Vercel, brought up Munroe's cartoon during my recent interview with him.

He explained that AI is finding weaknesses even in software that the industry has treated as dependable for decades.

This is partly a version of the tragedy of the commons: Everyone benefits from a shared resource, but no one has sufficient incentive to take responsibility for maintaining it.

And let's be clear: The volunteers keeping essential software running aren't the villains here. The companies benefiting from their work have a much greater responsibility.

Occhino thinks AI could help solve the problem it is exposing.

He described an idea being discussed at Vercel: Create a foundation or coalition that funds efforts to identify vulnerable software and replace it with safer alternatives.

"We need a consortium. We need a coalition," he told me.

He suggested companies could contribute computing resources and AI tools to the effort. Nothing has been formally announced, but the idea is compelling.

Indeed, OpenAI's Patch the Planet effort is an example of what's possible.

Rather than simply using AI to create more software, the industry could use it to repair what already exists.

Occhino put it nicely: Companies need to spend less time chasing new ideas and more time asking how to make existing systems "just work really, really well."

That's a better response than panicking about the imminent collapse of the internet.

AI didn't create decades of neglected software. We did. Perhaps it's time to clean up our own slop.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• Mark Cuban compared swarms of AI agents to cockroaches finding ways into systems.
• Cuban said agents can launch brute-force attacks at scale without inventing new hacks.
• Cuban said defenders can also "spray" their systems with AI, which makes defenses more accessible.

Mark Cuban has pest-control tips for the AI age.

Speaking at a Reuters NEXT Newsmaker event on Friday, the entrepreneur and billionaire investor compared the threat posed by swarms of AI agents to cockroaches finding their way into a freshly treated house.

"When I go talk to cybersecurity experts, I ask them all the time. I'm like, when we hear about these hacks and breakthroughs and, you know, different problems, do these AIs invent something new?" Cuban said.

"No, they didn't invent something new," Cuban added. "But they're able to do something in mass volume that it's all brute force hacks."

Cuban compared the challenge to keeping cockroaches out of a house.

"It's like the cockroach theory, where if somebody can create enough agents, it'll find a way to get in, and then it just exploits that. But the good news is you can spray your systems with just as much AI, and I think there's gonna be more effort from the good guys trying to stop the bad guys," Cuban said. "I'm not a doomer at all."

The AI industry is already creating its own team of exterminators to contain risks.

OpenAI safety roles on LinkedIn jumped by 91% over the past year, spanning work such as system testing, technical research, and governance.

The risks have also surfaced during testing. Anthropic said that three Claude models accessed organizations’ live systems without permission after a third-party testing environment was misconfigured. The company subsequently introduced real-time classifiers to detect and block attempts to escape testing environments.

Cuban said AI could make malicious activity more accessible, but the same techniques could also strengthen defenses.

"There will be scenarios where bad stuff happens, but we've always had hacks," said Cuban. "And if it's brute force on that side with the bad guys, you can also use brute force with the good guys."