Hacking attempts rise after flaws found in program affecting 70% of websites

The homepage of the PHP.net website is seen on Thursday in Singapore. Cybersecurity flaws were recently identified in the popular PHP programming language, which is used on a vast number of websites across the world, including those of major companies and national governments. The PHP Foundation released two patches designed to fix the vulnerabilities. Yong Teck Lim/Getty Images hide caption

A few months ago AI caused global alarm after autonomous agents were found to have cheated on evaluations and then tried to cover it up, in what became known as the "Hugging Face hack."

This week, AI and hacking are back in the spotlight with AI technology credited to have helped prevent a global cybersecurity crisis.

Cybersecurity firm Wiz Research, using OpenAI technology, announced on Wednesday it had discovered security flaws in a computer programming language that helps run some 70% of the world's websites.

OpenAI called the bug "one of the most impactful vulnerabilities in recent memory." Wiz Research warned that its "successful exploitation could allow attackers to take control of affected servers, steal sensitive data, and deface the websites running on them."

Corporations and governments from the U.K. to Japan are now rushing to prevent hackers from capitalizing on the flaws.

The flaws were discovered in a major programming language called PHP, short for Hypertext Preprocessor. Wiz Research calls PHP "the backbone of the web," saying the technology has underpinned much of the internet since the 1990s.

"These findings rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history," the firm said, adding that before publicly disclosing the flaw, teams had worked on building a solution that's now available to websites to protect themselves.