People who work in cybersecurity or work on the fundamentals of digital infrastructure do not want to live in “exciting times,” but right now, they don’t have a choice.

Binance was just hacked in what is, so far, the largest cryptocurrency heist in history. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, narrowly averted a major attack through a third-party extension that would have allowed hackers to upload worms to the affected computers. A number of major airlines were affected when the Spanish travel-tech company Amadeus was hacked, leaking customer information on the web (mercifully without payment info, this time). At the center of this are generative AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which all at once are empowering hackers while billing themselves as the only line of defense. They’ve found a new niche, and it’s to become a protection racket. 

The threat is quantifiable: Severe bugs are classified as CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures), and around 400,000 have been officially logged since 1988. Of those, 13,000 happened in the last month. PHP2Shell is the perfect example of this. If you spent any time on social media in the last few weeks, you probably heard some chatter about PHP2Shell and just how dire the threat was. Roughly 70% of websites rely on code written using PHP, and the announcement of a fundamental bug in the language—akin to discovering that millions of buildings share the same faulty lock, potentially giving intruders easy access—had people panicking. Websites such as Wikimedia preemptively went offline until a fix was pushed through.

Source link