AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt
It demonstrates a concrete case where AI enabled researchers to weaponize a previously dismissed software bug into a critical vulnerability affecting a vast portion of the web, highlighting an urgent shift in the balance between cyber attackers and open-source maintainers.
Cybersecurity researchers at Calif, aided by AI tools during an OpenAI-sponsored audit, discovered how to turn a known out-of-memory bug in PHP into a critical remote code execution vulnerability dubbed PHP2Shell. While the PHP Foundation patched the flaw in two months, experts warn that AI's ability to weaponize seemingly minor legacy bugs creates a severe asymmetry between discovering and fixing vulnerabilities.