Millions of exploitation attempts hit within hours of newly public PHP bugs being released, according to Cloudflare analysis.
The flaws, collectively dubbed PHP2Shell, triggered a scramble among security teams and web admins to patch the software. Criminal hackers moved quickly to exploit them in the wild. This speed is unsurprising given broad access to AI tools that make it easier for attackers to turn flaws into working exploits.
So far, the nightmare scenario of mass victim takeovers and breaches has not come to pass. The PHP Foundation says it has seen no successful exploitation of the bugs. Many publicly circulating potential exploits appear ineffective.
AI turns history into a crisis
Perhaps the most interesting role of AI amid the chaos this week is how advanced models helped researchers uncover practical exploits for vulnerabilities known about, at least in part, for years. In other words, AI helped turn historic vulnerabilities into a current crisis.
Researchers at security company Calif were the first to identify the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities and create exploits in early August. They used frontier AI tools as part of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program, but also relied on expert human knowledge of PHP, its dynamics, and its weaknesses. Some underlying issues were identified in 2024 but were deemed too complex to exploit at the time.
Following Calif’s discovery, researchers at OpenAI and the Google-owned security firm Wiz independently discovered PHP2Shell flaws using AI tools.
“The vulnerability had been known to the PHP team for years, but because it could not be leveraged by an attacker—at least, not a human one—it was not addressed,” says Sagi Tzadik, a security researcher at Wiz.
No software is perfect. There are inevitably flaws in even the most critical, foundational digital tools. The expanding capabilities of AI models have made it faster to analyze and potentially exploit vulnerabilities. This puts even more pressure on under-resourced IT teams, developers, and admins to keep up. Microsoft’s security updates included a record 1,453 security vulnerabilities this month alone. Meanwhile, Bank of America recently hired 1,000 consultants to fix flaws discovered by Anthropic’s Mythos.
Security researchers emphasise that AI is ultimately not doing anything new, but rather magnifying existing dynamics of vulnerability discovery and coordinated disclosure.
“We’ll definitely see more of these long-life bugs that are in every version of the software for the last decade or whatever,” says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy and a former NSA hacker. “But I think there’s only so much of this low-hanging fruit. There isn’t much else that has the specific reach of PHP. It’s a pretty wild attack surface—most other tools aren’t exposed to the internet by design.”
Researchers note that even with frontier models, most examples of sophisticated AI-aided hacking also involve human expertise. As Ryan Austin, the Calif researcher who first discovered the PHP flaws, wrote this week, “No model is simply capable of unearthing ‘all bugs’ with simple prompts. At least for now.”
In short, security engineer and researcher Niels Provos says everyone can dial back their freak-outs, at least a bit.
“To be honest, I am not really worried,” he says, “about AI finding an overwhelming number of historic bugs that are newly exploitable—or new vulnerabilities that couldn’t have been practically exploited without AI. People have now been looking with AI for over a year, and it required a highly skilled team to find this one. I guess we will see whether I am completely wrong, but I doubt it.”
What it means
For people making things, the change is practical: tools that once required deep, rare knowledge to find flaws can now be used by anyone with a prompt. This lowers the barrier to entry for finding issues, but it does not mean the problems themselves are new or that automated systems can solve everything alone. Human skill remains essential to turn a theoretical weakness into a working exploit.
