A.I. Has Made It Easy to Brute Force the Internet ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

To give you a sense of what I’m seeing, Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most respected cryptographers in the world, posted “we’re in the part of the movie where you need to throw whatever you can in the path of the zombies and hope it slows them down,” and “so many people discovering that the whole Internet is dry tinder and the only thing keeping it from burning is the fact that teenagers haven’t found the matches yet,” […]

And all those posts came before people using AI-powered tools found vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers much of the internet. […]

Charlie Warzel, the Atlantic (gift link):

Once the patch was released yesterday, websites everywhere went offline to implement the fix. These included government websites in Germany and Finland, some hospital and school websites in Europe, and international sites such as 4chan. During this race to secure the majority of the internet, I noticed one name pop up in posts on Reddit and X: Ondřej Surý.

There are likely to be many more weeks like this one which, in the best case, leaves us with more secure digital infrastructure and better practices for the future. But it is going to be an uncomfortable ride to get there and, as usual, much of the hard work will be done by volunteers with little financial support or credit.

Anyway, I still think PHP is pretty great.