
70% of websites run on PHP.
And you knew about this bug for two years and said nothing?
Are you serious?
When I wrote about Black October, I told it like most people did: AI found a 14-year-old bug in about a week.
I missed the worse part.
In 2024, a PHP core developer found the first signs of the problem behind CVE-2026-109618. A possible exploit was discussed, but nobody found a concrete way in. The team couldn't agree on a fix, and the work kept stalling for months.
Then on Aug 11, 2026, Calif reported remote code execution with the same root cause.
By October, the bug had a name, patches were rushed out, and Cloudflare was seeing millions of attack attempts.
PHP's own foundation calls the delay "a structural failure."
AI didn't create this hole. It just ended the time PHP thought it had.