Imagine you work for a government, and your job is to make sure people can get things done online. Then one Wednesday you do the one thing your job was supposed to prevent: you switch off your own website. Nobody has broken in yet. You just know someone could.
Part 1 of an AI Drama double. On 21 October 2026, governments on several continents closed their own digital doors as a precaution. The reason: critical flaws in PHP, the engine behind roughly seven in ten websites whose server language can be identified. They were found with frontier AI models and can be exploited remotely, without a password. And Anthropic's deputy security chief says it gets worse before it gets better.
In this episode:
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Governments flip the switch (
00:49) — the Dutch cybersecurity centre takes its own site offline, DigiD's website goes dark, a minister in the House of Lords lists 32 unavailable government services, Offenbach pulls three systems, and Latvia does it differently: it closes the border for its websites. Meanwhile, at most companies, nothing happens.
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You just want to book a room (
07:08) — kids on holiday, a hotel with a heated pool, and the booking that doesn't work. What PHP actually is, why WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and TYPO3 all sit on it, and why "it's only our website" is the wrong first reaction.
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The stranger behind the reception desk (
12:43) — remote code execution, out-of-memory corruption and use-after-free, explained with a hotel front desk, a full desk and drawer number 12. Why the damage depends on how many keys your web services hold, and why "we're behind Cloudflare" doesn't make you safe.
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The bug was old. The proof changed everything. (
19:12) — the first warning signs came in a 2024 audit. Then Ryan Austin of Calif, working under OpenAI's "Patch the Planet" programme with GPT-5.6 Sol, and separately the cloud security firm Wiz, proved it could be exploited. The White House and US agencies were informed. And a thought experiment: what would you do if you sat in the NSA's chair?
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The fix is published. Your company isn't fixed. (
27:35) — the quiet coordinated disclosure fell apart: the identifiers leaked, a demo video went out, and Amazon's honeypots saw attack attempts. Why a patch on the server is not a patched process, and why hosting providers, agencies and third parties all sit between you and the fix.
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"Our real systems are SAP and Microsoft." (
34:13) — a family-owned machine builder, a small spare-parts portal and the credentials lying behind it. And the week didn't stop at PHP: Node.js, GitLab and a poisoned LiteLLM release.
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Why he says it gets worse first (
38:13) — Jason Clinton's post, read about four million times: go to your board, not for more AI, for the basics, and hold on for eighteen months. Why AI makes the tedious search fast, why human code is the problem, and what Project Glasswing, OpenAI's evaluations and Gemini 4 Argon show.
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Monday morning: three conversations (
45:51) — who may switch off your website at three in the morning, how you keep the business running during the repair (Maersk had fax machines), and what might already have happened while the flaw was known.
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The cliffhanger (
48:34) — these are conversations for your head of IT, your board and your hosting provider. Then the full song.
🧵 The thread — the flaw wasn't new. What's new is how fast AI finds it and proves it, on both sides. Part 2 (#137, Thursday) goes behind the IT department's doors: who actually fixes the company?
On Monday, ask your IT three questions: who runs our most important website, who may switch it off at night, and how do we keep working while it's being repaired?
Corrections to the recording:
• The government shutdowns happened on 21 October 2026, not the 26th.
• According to OX Security, about 99.28% of roughly two million visible PHP servers still showed an unpatched version 24 hours after the fix, so well under 1% were patched, not "90.3%" and "10%".
• Jason Clinton is Anthropic's deputy Chief Information Security Officer (deputy CISO), not "deputy chief information officer".
• Google's model is called Gemini 4 Argon.
• The NSA part is Malcolm's own thought experiment, not a reported fact.
Sources: PHP Foundation and php.net advisories; Calif (Ryan Austin, 21 Oct); OpenAI ("Patch the Planet"); Wiz Research; Amazon Web Services security blog (21 Oct); Cloudflare (21 Oct); OX Security (22 Oct); W3Techs (24 Oct); NCSC-NL and Logius / DigiD; Hansard, House of Lords (22 Oct); City of Offenbach (21 Oct); CERT.LV (21 Oct); Valtori; NSW Government (22 Oct); Node.js and GitLab security releases (21 Oct); LiteLLM; Jason D. Clinton on X (20 Aug, 22 Oct); Anthropic Project Glasswing; Google Gemini 4 Argon. Disclosure: Malcolm is an Anthropic Claude Ambassador.
📱 Ping Malcolm on WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +43 676 6144 904
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