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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

xecution. All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately.

Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.

We are working on updates to resolve this problem