The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the bugs, this is only the beginning, as AI changes how quickly novel vulnerabilities can be uncovered and exploited.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Tomer Schwartz, CTO of Exposure Management & AppSec at Google-owned Wiz, who was part of the scramble — alongside OpenAI, research group Calif, and the PHP team — to fix the bugs. On the show, Schwartz and Bellan get into what the race looked like from the inside, how early-stage startups can build with security in mind, and why patching by hand won’t scale.
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
1:50 PHP2Shell explained
2:53 The patch scramble and how the vulnerability leaked
6:05 How AI helped Wiz uncover critical bugs
9:17 Which AI models are best at finding vulnerabilities?
12:10 The flaws in coordinated disclosure
15:12 Why some companies got an early heads-up
18:56 Why 12-year-old bugs are suddenly exploitable
22:00 Who’s still vulnerable and what companies should do now
24:16 The ‘vulnpocalypse’ and preparing for a future of constant security crises
27:13 From cybersecurity startups to Wiz and ServiceNow
29:42 Outro
