Equity · Friday, October 23, 2026
Researchers and AI labs discovered critical, decades-old security vulnerabilities in the open-source programming language PHP, affecting tens of millions of websites. Organizations and governments are scrambling to patch the flaws or taking websites offline to avoid exploits, highlighting the heavy reliance on vulnerable open-source infrastructure.
“Researchers revealed critical flaws in PHP, the programming language behind more than half of the web.”
“this is a vulnerability that has existed in PHP for decades, which, you know, in PHP has been used as a programming language to build so much of the web.”
“WordPress, Drupal, something like 70% of, of websites. PHP is there. So we're talking tens of millions of websites.”