What is PHP and why did it spark a global cyber-security scramble?

This video can not be played How did AI discover the internet's massive cyber-security risk? For more than a decade, serious flaws had gone undetected in the technology underpinning much of the internet. It took AI to bring them to light and caused a global cyber-security alert. The vulnerabilities lie within a programming language called PHP, which has been used internationally since the 2000s to build websites. Governments and cyber-security agencies around the world are scrambling to contain the fallout of the discovery on Wednesday, and have urged website operators to install a new emergency fix or consider taking their platforms offline. Cyber-security firm Wiz - one of the companies whose researchers uncovered the vulnerabilities - described the flaws as the "most severe" ever detected by AI. OpenAI, whose technology was used to find the flaws, called the discovery "one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory". Cyber-security issue hitting sites worldwide prompts 'millions' of hacking attempts Most people may not have heard of PHP, but they probably interact with it daily. It stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, an open-source, back-end programming language which runs on a web server. Developed in the early 1990s to help serve dynamic web pages and applications, PHP still powers lots of platforms today, including Wikipedia, online shops and WordPress – the system behind many websites. When you visit a site, PHP is the code which collects data and effectively turns it into a page you can read. It has also been used to write a number of tools for building or speeding up the creation of web apps, with Laravel, Symfony and Drupal among popular PHP frameworks. According to cyber-security firm Wiz, which helped uncover the critical PHP vulnerabilities surfaced this week, PHP powers 70% of the world's websites. It is maintained by a non-profit called the PHP Foundation, external, composed of individuals and companies which depend on the language and aim to ensure its "long-term prosperity". A group of cyber-security researchers and organisations disclosed two vulnerabilities within PHP this week, which they warned could have the potential to upend sites across the internet. Cyber firms Wiz and Calif said the flaws – coined "php2shell" - were inherent in the language itself, with versions of PHP released over the last decade affected. Ryan Austin, a Calif researcher who helped uncover the security issues, told the BBC it was "the most serious vulnerability I've ever found".