If you spent much time online this week, you likely noticed how it briefly felt like the end of days as government websites, game marketplaces, and furry image boards alike were pulled offline in a scramble to address newly-discovered security vulnerabilities in PHP—a scripting language used by roughly 70% of the world's websites, according to some estimates.

It was a harrowing incident, revealing flaws in foundational internet infrastructure that might have turned some of the most popular web destinations into attack vectors. And in an interview with Reuters, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says we should expect to see similar episodes on a regular basis in the years ahead as LLM technologies accelerate the discovery of exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Prince said that Cloudflare—a major cloud networking and cybersecurity provider that a massive number of websites relies on—is aware of "a bunch of additional severe vulnerabilities that are present in other pieces of critical software" like those that triggered the PHP panic earlier this week. And as both cybersecurity experts and bad actors task LLMs with identifying previously unrecognized weaknesses in the core technologies of the internet, there will likely be more to follow.

"I think we're going to have a couple years where every single week it's going to feel like the sky is falling," Prince said.

Previously, the rate at which exploitable flaws in software could be identified was limited by the finite number of experts able and willing to devote the necessary time and attention. Likewise for those seeking to weaponize those flaws.

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