We're in "Black October". Here's Why

We’re in “Black October”. Here’s Why

"These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history."

In this newsletter, we always discuss how the world will change. We've often discussed how things in AI are very Hemingway-esque: things happen gradually, then suddenly.

And for some people, the cybersecurity cohort, to be precise, the sudden face is now here for reasons that people now describe as “Black October.”

And, to be clear, it’s changing for the worse.

This article discusses the recent events of “Black October”, why they matter, how AI impacted/participated, and what this means for the future of the industry and software engineering as a whole.

I don’t want to delay this any longer, so you know what is happening and can act if you need to. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

One of the Worst in History

In this week alone, the world has faced dozens of serious cybersecurity risk events, all occurring almost simultaneously, many of them very severe.

And, surprisingly to no one, AI is at the center of it all. But let’s first start by describing the two most important events, which some consider some of the worst in software history, no less.

The internet's backbone, vulnerable.

This may sound like extreme hyperbole. But before you dismiss it that way, look at some of the notable reactions to the PHP event:

Japan’s Prime Minister Takaichi urged to take action “tonight”

The FBI’s Cybercrime division asked for the exact same thing.

The National Security Agency asked people to take their apps offline if they couldn’t patch this in the short term.

And cybersecurity company Wiz described it as one of the most severe cybersecurity events in history, as we saw at the top of this newsletter.

Needless to say, you should immediately ask your coding agent or cybersecurity team how affected you are and patch everything right away.

So, what happened? Two very serious vulnerabilities were found in one of the Internet's backbones: PHP, which means these vulnerabilities pose a serious risk to a large part of the web.

PHP powers platforms including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, and security firm Wiz estimates that it underpins roughly 70% of websites. Yes, that means exactly what you think it means:

70% of world sites could be exposed to this cybersecurity risk.

That is why Japan’s PM, the FBI, and the NSA were jointly panicking.

And how does the bug work? PHP is the software that runs the application behind many websites. Normally, it processes a visitor’s request, sends a response, and clears away the temporary information used for that request.

These bugs mean that, when a request fails in certain ways, PHP can leave that cleanup unfinished. During a later request, it can mistake newly supplied information for its own trusted internal data.

And now, it has been uncovered that an attacker can exploit that confusion to extract sensitive information or, in demonstrated attacks, make the server execute commands of…

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