Odd Lots · Friday, October 30, 2026
Tai Yun and Bruce Dang from the hacking firm Calif explain how their team, alongside Wiz and with funding from OpenAI's Patch the Planet program, discovered a critical vulnerability in the PHP coding language. Although the PHP Foundation had previously identified the issue years earlier, they chose not to fix it because the fix was expensive and difficult; Calif used AI to successfully develop an exploit for it.
“Then the Peace Preach Foundation actually shared with us that they actually found this vulnerability, the same vulnerability, two years ago. But they didn't fix it. Because when they found it, they discovered that the fix is very expensive.”
“And for exploitation, like AI plays a major role in it. It's like becomes an engineering problem where our engineers would tell AI, you know, this is how I want to design our exploit and you go and do it.”