2004年7月，安全研究员斯特凡·埃瑟（Stefan Esser）发出了一则警告。
In July 2004, security researcher Stefan Esser sent a warning.
PHP是支撑全球70%网站的编程语言，而其中的一个严重漏洞可能会让攻击者做出一些非常恶劣的事情：读取密码、窃取数据库，甚至接管整个网站。
A critical flaw in PHP, the programming language that powers 70% of the world’s websites, could allow an attacker to do some seriously nefarious stuff: read passwords, steal databases or even take over entire websites.
但埃瑟的警告在几十年里大多被忽视了。2020年，另一位研究人员发现了相关的问题，PHP的管理者发布了一个部分修复补丁。2024年，人们又发现了一个类似PHP的漏洞，但该漏洞一直未得到修复。
But Esser’s warning went mostly ignored for decades. In 2020, another researcher discovered a related problem, and the PHP overseers issued a partial fix. A similar PHP vulnerability was uncovered in 2024 – but was left unfixed.
为什么这个互联网基石所面临的最严重威胁之一，会被搁置22年未得到解决？
Why was one of the most severe threats to the foundation of the internet left unresolved for 22 years?
因为要想弄清楚如何利用它，人类需要付出令人头脑麻木的工作：枯燥、耗时、单调的编码。这使得利用该PHP漏洞变得不切实际。而人工智能在两天内就摸清了如何做到这一点。
Because it would have taken mind-numbing work for a human to figure out how to take advantage of it: tedious, time-consuming, monotonous coding. That rendered the PHP vulnerability impractical to exploit. AI just figured out how to do it in two days.
周三，OpenAI公开披露了这一漏洞的利用方式，并与修复该问题的安全更新同时宣布。
On Wednesday, OpenAI’s public revelation of the exploit was announced in conjunction with a security update to fix the problem.
你可能会想，谢天谢地，好人先一步找到了它。但这种人工智能辅助的发现让网络安全研究人员深感担忧，因为下一次发现它的人可能是一个想要将其武器化的人。而且人工智能并不在意是谁在扣动扳机。互联网全靠鞋带和泡泡糖勉强维系着。
Phew, you might think. The good guys got to it first. But the AI-assisted discovery deeply concerned cybersecurity researchers, because the next one might come from someone who wants to weaponize it. And AI doesn’t care who’s pulling the trigger. The internet is held together with shoestring and bubblegum.
一幅切合实际的xkcd漫画将“所有现代数字基础设施”形象化为一个巨大的叠叠乐塔，由一块细长的垂直方块支撑，上面写着标签：“一个内布拉斯加州的随机路人自2003年以来一直在默默维护的项目”。7月30日，人工智能安全公司Calif的研究人员与OpenAI的新安全倡议“修补星球”（Patch the Planet）合作，决定将一个大语言人工智能模型对准其中一块叠叠乐——PHP，看看会产生什么结果。他们本没指望能发现任何严重的问题。
An apt xkcd cartoon visualizes “all modern digital infrastructure” as a giant Jenga tower supported by one, thin, vertical block with the label: “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.”On July 30, researchers at AI security company Calif, in conjunction with OpenAI’s new Patch the Planet security initiative, decided to point a large-language AI model at one of those Jenga blocks – PHP – and see what came of it. It didn’t expect to find anything critical.
8月1日，它发现了一种攻击PHP漏洞的方法。几天后，又发现了一个。随后又是一个。那个月晚些时候，谷歌支持的安全公司Wiz——另一家“修补地球”计划参与者——也发现了针对PHP漏洞的新利用手段。
On August 1, it found a method to attack PHP’s vulnerabilities. Days later, it found another. Then another. Later that month, Google-backed security company Wiz – another Patch the Planet participant – discovered new exploits for PHP vulnerabilities, too.
补丁于周三发布，各公司公开披露了各自的发现。Wiz称这是软件历史上最严重的漏洞之一。
The patch went out Wednesday, and the companies publicly disclosed their findings. Wiz called it one of the most severe vulnerabilities in software history.
安全社区在社交媒体上议论纷纷，纷纷表示“早就告诉过你们了”。
The security community lit up social media with I-told-you-sos.
卡内基梅隆大学计算机工程教授Vyas Sekar表示：“安全行业长期以来一直在警告即将到来的安全末日，因为AI做这些事情非常、非常快——比人类更强。这可能只是众多事件的开端。这是一个警钟。”Sekar说，还有更多类似PHP的漏洞等待被发现和利用。多得多。有些是已知的，许多则是未知的。
“The security industry has long been warning about the coming security apocalypse, because AI can do these things very, very quickly – better than humans,” said Vyas Sekar, professor of computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “This may be the first of many. This is a wakeup call.”Sekar says there are more PHP-like vulnerabilities out there to discover and exploit. A lot more. Some are known, and many are unknown.
AI工具的广泛可用性显著降低了黑客利用潜在安全漏洞的门槛。这一事实让Anthropic感到恐慌，以至于这家AI公司在6月暂停了其Mythos模型的部署，因为该模型在暴露安全漏洞和寻找攻击载体方面表现太过出色，以至于美国政府将其列为国家安全威胁。
The wide availability of AI tools has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for hackers to take advantage of potential security vulnerabilities. That fact freaked out Anthropic enough that the AI company paused deployment of its Mythos model in June, as it was so good at exposing security vulnerabilities and finding vectors for attack that the US government labeled it a national security threat.
但加州研究员Ryan Austin在一篇博客文章中指出，该公司并未使用任何公众无法普遍获得的特殊AI模型。
But Calif researcher Ryan Austin noted in a blog post that the company didn’t use any special AI models that weren’t generally available to the public.
Fieldwork AI首席执行官Nick Rogers表示，AI工具的这种普及化表明，“靠穷举法实现安全”不再是抵御坏人的可行保障。
That democratization of AI tools made clear that “security by exhaustion” is no longer a viable safeguard against bad guys, said Nick Rogers, CEO of Fieldwork AI.
22年来，PHP就像一家没有保安的银行。任何人都可以走到金库前把现金拿走——只要他们有时间尝试每一个密码。这项工作太艰巨，不值得任何人花时间去做。但AI不会疲倦。而且它破解保险箱的速度比人类快得多。
For 22 years, PHP was like a bank with no security guards. Anyone could walk down to the vault and make off with the cash – if they had the time to try every code. It was such arduous work, it wasn’t worth anyone’s time. But AI doesn’t get tired. And it can crack safes way faster than humans.
“将一个理论上的（漏洞）转化为可利用的漏洞，是一项相当繁琐且机械的工作，”Rogers说。“AI可以不断尝试，直到找到办法。你甚至不需要动手。你可以喝着咖啡，看着它完成。”实际上，PHP是驱动互联网大部分网站的引擎。直到周三修补之前，它存在一个致命缺陷。
“Taking a theoretical (vulnerability) and proving you can exploit it is quite tedious and mechanical work,” said Rogers. “AI can keep churning until it figures it out. You don’t even need to try. You can drink coffee while it does it.”Effectively, PHP is an engine that powers most of the internet. Until it was patched Wednesday, it had a fatal flaw.
一个漏洞为攻击者留下了可乘之机，让他们能够篡改PHP处理网站请求的方式。如果服务器因内存耗尽而崩溃，会留下残留数据，这些数据可能被利用来泄露信息或执行恶意代码。
A vulnerability left open a patch for an attacker to mess around with the way PHP processes requests to run websites. If a server crashed because it ran out of memory, it would leave stale data behind that could be exploited to leak the data or execute bad code.
可以把这种利用方式想象成利用一家繁忙餐厅的厨房。顾客用过多复杂的订单淹没厨师——多到让她在晚餐进行中途放弃，留下脏锅、生食材和食谱散落在台面上。随后，当新厨师被雇佣时，他用脏盘子端上受污染的食物——甚至将一些食谱连同晚餐订单一起送给顾客。
Think of the exploit like taking advantage of a busy restaurant kitchen. Customers could overwhelm the chef with too many complex orders – so much that she quits midway through dinner, leaving dirty pans, raw ingredients and recipes strewn about the counter. Then, when a new chef is hired, he serves the contaminated food on filthy dishes – and even sends some recipes to customers along with their dinner orders.
尽管该漏洞在理论上早已被认定为可利用，但弄清如何利用却被证明极其困难。黑客必须在特定时刻强制服务器发生内存耗尽崩溃，以绕过PHP的安全限制。
Although the vulnerability was long known to be theoretically exploitable, figuring out how to do it proved exceedingly difficult. Hackers had to force the server into an out-of-memory crash at a specific instant to bypass PHP’s safety limits.
当研究人员将AI指向该问题时，它迅速找到了几种绕过方法。一种方案利用了PHP测量压缩文件和解码文件方式之间的不匹配。实际上，这允许压缩文件通过其关卡，让文件在内部自行解包并接管控制权。
When researchers pointed AI at the problem, it quickly found a couple ways around that. One solution exploits a mismatch between the way PHP measures compressed files and decoded files. Effectively, it allowed compressed files through its gates, letting the file unpack itself and take over from the inside.
另一种则用深度嵌套的文件结构攻击PHP，淹没PHP的目录结构，触发内存故障。
Another attacks PHP with deeply nested file structures that overwhelmed PHP’s directory structure, triggering the memory failure.
该漏洞已被修补，但威胁可能尚未结束，安全公司CrowdStrike的对抗对手副总裁Adam Meyers指出。许多过时版本的PHP仍在使用中，且该补丁几乎肯定没有修复PHP的所有问题。
The vulnerability was patched, but the threat may not be over, noted Adam Meyers, vice president of counter adversary at security company CrowdStrike. Many outdated versions of PHP are still in use, and the patch almost certainly didn’t fix all of PHP’s problems.
此外，据安全公司 Cloudflare 称，在补丁发布前，关于该漏洞的明显泄露导致在公告发布前的几小时内出现了数千次利用尝试。
Also, an apparent leak about the vulnerability before the patch was released resulted in thousands of exploits in the hours ahead of the announcement, according to security company Cloudflare.
“攻击者不需要先发现漏洞——他们可以事后将其武器化，”Meyers 说。“我们仍在等待观察，这其中有多少会出现在实际攻击中。”OpenAI 在其关于 PHP 补丁的披露中提出了几项建议，所有建议基本都归结为：从一开始就编写更好、更安全的代码。
“Bad guys don’t need to find the vulnerability first – they can weaponize it after the fact,” Meyers said. “We are still waiting to see how much of this shows up in the wild.”OpenAI offered several suggestions in its disclosure about the PHP patch, all of which basically boil down to: Write better, more secure code from the start.
如果你的 Web 应用程序是用 PHP 编写的，这并没有多大帮助。
That’s not super helpful if your web application has been written using PHP.
“迁移离开 PHP 是一个相当昂贵的过程，”Meyers 指出。“这不像从 Microsoft 邮件切换到 Google 邮件；你需要重建整个应用程序。”如果解决方案不是将 70% 的网站迁移到一种新的编程语言，那么修复其根本问题——以及世界上所有其他软件问题——也几乎不会是一件容易的事。
“Migrating away from PHP is a pretty expensive process,” noted Meyers. “It’s not like switching from Microsoft mail to Google mail; you need to rebuild the whole application.”If the solution isn’t to migrate 70% of the web to a new programming language, then fixing its underlying problems – and all the other software problems in the world – would hardly be an easy fix, either.
因此，安全社区的运作方式可能需要一场范式转变。实际上，就是假设所有事物都构成安全风险。
What’s needed, then, may be a paradigm shift in the way the security community operates. Effectively, assume everything poses a security risk.
安全公司 Concentric AI 的联合创始人 Madhu Shashanka 表示，公司需要像空中交通管制员对待周围环境那样，对待每一项业务运营。
Companies need to treat every single business operation like air traffic controllers treat their surroundings, said Madhu Shashanka, cofounder of security company Concentric AI.
“所有事物都是潜在漏洞，”Shashanka 说。“每一项业务运营都是高风险运营。”例如，某些软件即使只留有几天未修补，公司也会让自己暴露在漏洞之下，而这些漏洞对于攻击者来说，已不再难以利用，成本也不再高昂。
“Everything is a potential vulnerability,” Shashanka said. “Every business operation is a high-stakes operation.”For example, companies that leave certain software unpatched – even for a few days – are exposing themselves to vulnerabilities that are no longer too difficult or expensive for bad actors to exploit.
“外面存在大量从未被利用的漏洞，因为那需要付出努力，”Shashanka 说。“AI 让这种努力变得毫无意义。”
“Lots of vulnerabilities are out there that are never exploited because it takes effort,” said Shashanka. “AI has rendered that effort meaningless.”