As big a fan of open software as I am, the combinations of open-weight LLM models that are capable of e2e cyber-penetration (even by actors that might just put in the compute and prompt it: "make me money") and the current mitigations that let those entities, that already hold too much data and power (political, infrastructure, etc), expand to become the eventual gatekeepers of the "open internet", is highly worrisome.
If you have ideas for how we can adjust to this safely and with an eventual more equal distribution of power, please do share.
The invention of the locomotive was also the invention of the train wreck. V.
The disaster is not just "open weight" model penetrating everything, its is that we have built the whole world around an IT revolution that never really reached maturity and became secure. The chickens are just coming home to roost.
Those same entities would become gate keepers of the LLMs too.
I think the real disaster is the asymmetry in time it takes for large existing systems (inert) to adapt to equally powerful but single-goal (small complexity) attackers. [considering attackers and defenders have equal access to resources to drive the same open-weight models to either defend or attack]
> we have built the whole world around an IT revolution that never really reached maturity and became secure
I don't disagree, but how does this relate to this incident, in practice? We're talking about a zero-day vulnerability here. What do you think should have happened - forbid any licensed IT practitioners from deploying PHP at all? No WordPress or Wikipedia?
Stop using memory-unsafe languages for anything unless a
formal proof of safety is produced, only use OSes with strong sandboxing mechanism, make sure every piece of software is being sandboxed, etc. Or even just: “make the software authors liable of criminal negligence if an exploit occurs and they cannot demonstrate that they did everything possible to avoid it”.
It would indeed have slowed down the field immensely, but we would have avoided the chaos that is ahead of us right now.
And that sounds crazy compared to the standard we're used to, but what's crazy is that if your coffee machine explodes and harm you the makers are liable, but if your coffee machine is part of a botnet that disrupts a critical infrastructure, causing the death of people, then somehow the coffee machine maker faces literally no liability for not securing their IoT crap.
But scripts written in PHP are themselves memory-safe. The problem here isn't in a particular PHP script, but rather in the underlying implementation of the PHP runtime, which was written in a memory-unsafe language.
If that's your standard, then Python isn't a memory-safe language either, since CPython is partially written in C. Same as many other memory-safe languages like Ruby, anything in the .NET ecosystem...
Sure, and that's the problem: if security was taken as seriously as in any other industry then all of the above languages would have been written in SPARK(or its successor, which would likely have happened much before Rust had safety been paramount).
If you bother to check, you'll eventually notice that even "memory-safe languages" have accumulated a good share of CVEs, inclusive for memory safety issues. Check out RustSec.
> We don't need perfect security, what we need is computer people taking security seriously.
Are we in agreement that all this talk of "memory safe languages" is a red herring? I mean, who is foolish enough to believe that rewriting something in a different language makes is magically safer?
That sounds like some grand statement with answers. The inherent asymmetry of the attacker defender model means there will always be successful attackers.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a locomotive being used as a weapon. Maybe a more apt comparison would be “nuclear fission invented nuclear fallout”, no?
Intentional derailment is something that has happened which feels closer to the example then using the train itself as a weapon IMHO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mill for example
One thing that cybersecurity experts will always tell you, is that security is a mindset and a culture. It is not a device or an app that you can install, nor is it a person that you can hire.
Cybersecurity pros are regarded as cost centers, and often a thorn in the side of management, reminding them perpetually that they cannot do the expedient thing or the cost-cutting thing.
It is true that we need all the security experts we can get. It is also true that everyone, across the board, needs to be aware of security and their role in upholding it. You don't want "shadow IT" or social engineering to be your Achilles' heel. But without a culture of security, and this mindset pervading your corporate practices, hiring extra cybersecurity pros won't help.
> Cloudflare has been part of a coordinated effort to deploy mitigations to protect the Internet, working with PHP foundation, OpenAI and Wiz among others. Cloudflare has developed and deployed web application firewall (WAF) protections since early October 2026, which were deployed about 9 hours ahead of public disclosure
As big a fan of open software as I am, the combinations of open-weight LLM models that are capable of e2e cyber-penetration (even by actors that might just put in the compute and prompt it: "make me money") and the current mitigations that let those entities, that already hold too much data and power (political, infrastructure, etc), expand to become the eventual gatekeepers of the "open internet", is highly worrisome.
If you have ideas for how we can adjust to this safely and with an eventual more equal distribution of power, please do share.
The invention of the locomotive was also the invention of the train wreck. V. The disaster is not just "open weight" model penetrating everything, its is that we have built the whole world around an IT revolution that never really reached maturity and became secure. The chickens are just coming home to roost. Those same entities would become gate keepers of the LLMs too.
I think the real disaster is the asymmetry in time it takes for large existing systems (inert) to adapt to equally powerful but single-goal (small complexity) attackers. [considering attackers and defenders have equal access to resources to drive the same open-weight models to either defend or attack]
> we have built the whole world around an IT revolution that never really reached maturity and became secure
I don't disagree, but how does this relate to this incident, in practice? We're talking about a zero-day vulnerability here. What do you think should have happened - forbid any licensed IT practitioners from deploying PHP at all? No WordPress or Wikipedia?
Stop using memory-unsafe languages for anything unless a formal proof of safety is produced, only use OSes with strong sandboxing mechanism, make sure every piece of software is being sandboxed, etc. Or even just: “make the software authors liable of criminal negligence if an exploit occurs and they cannot demonstrate that they did everything possible to avoid it”.
It would indeed have slowed down the field immensely, but we would have avoided the chaos that is ahead of us right now.
And that sounds crazy compared to the standard we're used to, but what's crazy is that if your coffee machine explodes and harm you the makers are liable, but if your coffee machine is part of a botnet that disrupts a critical infrastructure, causing the death of people, then somehow the coffee machine maker faces literally no liability for not securing their IoT crap.
But scripts written in PHP are themselves memory-safe. The problem here isn't in a particular PHP script, but rather in the underlying implementation of the PHP runtime, which was written in a memory-unsafe language.
If that's your standard, then Python isn't a memory-safe language either, since CPython is partially written in C. Same as many other memory-safe languages like Ruby, anything in the .NET ecosystem...
Sure, and that's the problem: if security was taken as seriously as in any other industry then all of the above languages would have been written in SPARK(or its successor, which would likely have happened much before Rust had safety been paramount).
> Stop using memory-unsafe languages for anything
If you bother to check, you'll eventually notice that even "memory-safe languages" have accumulated a good share of CVEs, inclusive for memory safety issues. Check out RustSec.
We don't need perfect security, what we need is computer people taking security seriously.
People die in car accidents every day despite car manufacturers being very careful with security. Software is eons behind.
> We don't need perfect security, what we need is computer people taking security seriously.
Are we in agreement that all this talk of "memory safe languages" is a red herring? I mean, who is foolish enough to believe that rewriting something in a different language makes is magically safer?
That sounds like some grand statement with answers. The inherent asymmetry of the attacker defender model means there will always be successful attackers.
I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a locomotive being used as a weapon. Maybe a more apt comparison would be “nuclear fission invented nuclear fallout”, no?
Intentional derailment is something that has happened which feels closer to the example then using the train itself as a weapon IMHO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mill for example
railway guns go all the way back to the us civil war, but i suppose we can still quibble on locomotive there.
https://www.basis.ai/blog/ship-your-interpreters/
This is the counter. Make your software provably correct. Then you don't need gatekeepers nor to fear any attackers.
Thank you cloudflare. This single action would save millions of websites from getting pwnd
For anybody running Crowdtrike are there any downsides to enabling the Linux sensor settings for "Enhanced PHP visibility" ?
Edit: may have gotten Cloudflare and Crowdstrike mixed up but might as well leave this up
Any open source proxies you guys can recommend that I can set up to achieve sth similar for my own services?
After so many security issues, it’s kinda obvious to me that the present/future will need more security experts, or time invested in cybersecurity.
One thing that cybersecurity experts will always tell you, is that security is a mindset and a culture. It is not a device or an app that you can install, nor is it a person that you can hire.
Cybersecurity pros are regarded as cost centers, and often a thorn in the side of management, reminding them perpetually that they cannot do the expedient thing or the cost-cutting thing.
It is true that we need all the security experts we can get. It is also true that everyone, across the board, needs to be aware of security and their role in upholding it. You don't want "shadow IT" or social engineering to be your Achilles' heel. But without a culture of security, and this mindset pervading your corporate practices, hiring extra cybersecurity pros won't help.
It more reflect the fact that programming without deep AI verification is reckless today.
very very impressive how fast these guys are
From the article:
> Cloudflare has been part of a coordinated effort to deploy mitigations to protect the Internet, working with PHP foundation, OpenAI and Wiz among others. Cloudflare has developed and deployed web application firewall (WAF) protections since early October 2026, which were deployed about 9 hours ahead of public disclosure
Let the weenys burn. They gonna never learn how to secure their systems.
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