The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
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As security teams and web admins scrambled this week to patch newly public PHP bugs, criminal hackers quickly attempted to exploit the flaws in the wild. Millions of exploitation attempts hit within hours of the vulnerabilities being published, according to analysis from Cloudflare—unsurprising given broad access to AI tools that can make it easier for attackers to quickly exploit flaws.
本周，当安全团队和网站管理员忙于修补新公开的 PHP 漏洞时，犯罪黑客迅速尝试在现实环境中利用这些缺陷。根据 Cloudflare 的分析，漏洞发布后的数小时内就出现了数百万次攻击尝试——考虑到攻击者可以广泛使用 AI 工具来更轻松地快速利用漏洞，这一点并不令人意外。
So far, the nightmare scenario of mass victim takeovers and breaches hasn’t come to pass. The PHP Foundation says it hasn’t seen any successful exploitation of the bugs, collectively dubbed PHP2Shell, and many publicly circulating potential exploits appear to be ineffective. However, perhaps the most interesting role of AI amid the chaos this week is how advanced models helped researchers uncover practical exploitations for the vulnerabilities, which were known about, at least in part, for years. In other words, AI helped turn historic vulnerability into a current crisis.
到目前为止，大规模受害者被接管和数据泄露的噩梦场景尚未发生。PHP 基金会表示，尚未发现任何针对这些被统称为“PHP2Shell”漏洞的成功利用案例，且许多在公开渠道流传的潜在利用代码似乎也无效。然而，在本周的混乱中，AI 最有趣的作用或许在于先进模型如何帮助研究人员发现了这些漏洞的实际利用方法，而这些漏洞在某种程度上已为人所知多年。换句话说，AI 帮助将历史遗留的漏洞转化为了当前的危机。
So are we all about to be walloped by a wave of critical vulnerabilities that have been kicking around for decades?
那么，我们是否即将遭到一波存在了几十年的关键漏洞的冲击？
Researchers at security company Calif were the first to identify the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities and create exploits in early August—partially using frontier AI tools as part of OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program, but also using expert human knowledge of PHP, its dynamics, and its weaknesses. Some of the underlying issues were identified in 2024 but were deemed too complex to exploit at the time. Following Calif’s discovery, researchers at OpenAI and the Google-owned security firm Wiz independently discovered PHP2Shell flaws using AI tools.
安全公司 Calif 的研究人员在 8 月初首次识别出 PHP2Shell 漏洞并创建了利用程序——这部分得益于 OpenAI“修补地球”（Patch the Planet）计划中使用的前沿 AI 工具，同时也依赖于人类专家对 PHP 及其动态和弱点的专业知识。其中一些潜在问题在 2024 年就被识别出来，但当时被认为过于复杂而无法利用。在 Calif 发现之后，OpenAI 和谷歌旗下的安全公司 Wiz 的研究人员也独立利用 AI 工具发现了 PHP2Shell 的缺陷。
“The vulnerability had been known to the PHP team for years, but because it could not be leveraged by an attacker—at least, not a human one—it was not addressed,” says Sagi Tzadik, a security researcher at Wiz.
Wiz 的安全研究员萨吉·扎迪克（Sagi Tzadik）表示：“PHP 团队多年来一直知道这个漏洞，但因为它无法被攻击者利用——至少无法被人类攻击者利用——所以一直没有得到解决。”
No software is perfect. There are inevitably flaws in even the most critical, foundational digital tools, but the expanding capabilities of AI models have made it faster to analyze and potentially exploit vulnerabilities. This puts even more pressure on under-resourced IT teams, developers, and admins to keep up. Microsoft’s security updates included a record 1,453 security vulnerabilities this month alone. Meanwhile, Bank of America recently hired 1,000 consultants to fix flaws discovered by Anthropic’s Mythos. Security researchers emphasize, though, that AI is ultimately not doing anything new, but rather magnifying existing dynamics of vulnerability discovery and coordinated disclosure.
没有完美的软件。即使是最关键、最基础的数字工具也难免存在缺陷，但 AI 模型能力的扩展使得分析和潜在利用漏洞的速度变得更快。这给资源不足的 IT 团队、开发人员和管理员带来了更大的跟进压力。仅本月，微软的安全更新就包含了创纪录的 1,453 个安全漏洞。与此同时，美国银行最近聘请了 1,000 名顾问来修复由 Anthropic 的 Mythos 发现的缺陷。不过，安全研究人员强调，AI 最终并没有做任何新鲜事，而是在放大漏洞发现和协同披露的现有动态。
“We’ll definitely see more of these long-life bugs that are in every version of the software for the last decade or whatever,” says Jake Williams, vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy and a former NSA hacker. “But I think there’s only so much of this low-hanging fruit. There isn’t much else that has the specific reach of PHP. It’s a pretty wild attack surface—most other tools aren’t exposed to the internet by design.”
Hunter Strategy 的研发副总裁、前 NSA 黑客杰克·威廉姆斯（Jake Williams）表示：“我们肯定会看到更多这种存在于过去十年软件各个版本中的长期漏洞。但我认为这种‘低垂的果实’是有限的。没有多少其他工具能像 PHP 那样具有特定的覆盖范围。它的攻击面非常广——大多数其他工具在设计上并不会直接暴露在互联网上。”
Researchers note, too, that even with frontier models, most examples of sophisticated AI-aided hacking also involve human expertise. As Ryan Austin, the Calif researcher who first discovered the PHP flaws, wrote this week, “No model is simply capable of unearthing ‘all bugs’ with simple prompts. At least for now.”
研究人员还指出，即使使用前沿模型，大多数复杂的 AI 辅助黑客攻击案例也涉及人类专业知识。正如本周首次发现 PHP 漏洞的 Calif 研究员瑞安·奥斯汀（Ryan Austin）所写的那样：“目前还没有任何模型能够仅通过简单的提示就挖掘出‘所有漏洞’。至少目前是这样。”
In short, security engineer and researcher Niels Provos says, everyone can dial back their freak-outs, at least a bit. “To be honest, I am not really worried,” he says, about AI finding an overwhelming number of historic bugs that are newly exploitable—or new vulnerabilities that couldn’t have been practically exploited without AI. “People have now been looking with AI for over a year, and it required a highly skilled team to find this one. I guess we will see whether I am completely wrong, but I doubt it.”
简而言之，安全工程师兼研究员尼尔斯·普罗沃斯（Niels Provos）表示，大家至少可以稍微冷静一点，不必过度恐慌。他说，对于 AI 会发现大量可被新利用的历史漏洞，或者发现没有 AI 就无法实际利用的新漏洞，他并不感到担忧。“人们使用 AI 进行搜索已经超过一年了，而发现这个漏洞仍需要一个高技能团队。我想我们最终会看到我是否完全错了，但我对此表示怀疑。”