AI 驱动的黑客攻击激增将重塑网络生活。文 / Matteo Wong本周可能会载入网络安全史上最糟糕的一周。周三，关于 PHP 编程语言存在两个重大漏洞的消息传出，该语言被 70% 的网站使用，这促使世界各地的政府、医院和公司采取预防措施，将数字服务下线。针对这些弱点的利用尝试已达数百万次。
An explosion of AI-powered hacks will reshape life online.
但 PHP 漏洞只是一系列令人担忧的披露中最引人注目的一个。同一天，多个主要软件产品和平台（包括 Netflix、PayPal、沃尔玛 等大公司使用的产品）被曝存在安全缺陷或遭到成功入侵。周三，为每年三分之一美国成年人提供实验室检测服务的 Quest Diagnostics 也披露了其遭遇数据泄露。当我向网络安全公司 Palo Alto Networks 高级副总裁 Sam Rubin 询问另一起黑客攻击——云平台 Railway 遭入侵（Intuit 和 MGM Resorts 等公司使用该平台）的潜在后果时，他停顿了一下。
By Matteo Wong This week could go down as the worst in the history of cybersecurity. On Wednesday, news emerged about two major vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used by 70 percent of websites, which prompted governments, hospitals, and companies around the world to take digital services offline as a precaution.
“我没看到那一个，”Rubin 说，“这一周相当忙碌。”然而，过去几天最令人担忧的是，到明年，这一连串事件——一些安全专家称之为“黑色十月”——可能会被视为常态，甚至算得上平淡无奇。“人们会感觉到，一次又一次，我们在极其关键的软件中发现越来越多的漏洞，”互联网基础设施和安全公司 Cloudflare 首席执行官 Matthew Prince 告诉我。
“这个故事现在感觉独特而新鲜——几个月后，它会让人感觉我们每周都会遇到一次这样的事。”Prince 表示，他知晓不久后还将公布更多漏洞。
There have already been millions of attempts to exploit these weaknesses.
未来一两年，甚至更长一段时间，互联网将让人感到摇摇欲坠，比我们习以为常的情况更加危险。“有一阵子会让人感觉天要塌下来了，”Prince 说。几十年来，缺乏充分审查或审视的软件积累了大量漏洞积压——只要熟练黑客的数量非常少，这或多或少还算无伤大雅。在过去二十年里，企业、政府和个人陷入了一种虚假的安全感：大多数人毫不犹豫地在本地餐馆或礼品店的网站上输入信用卡号，或在几乎任何客户调查中填写家庭住址和电话号码。但互联网一直是个危险的地方。我们只是刚从恍惚中醒来。
But the PHP vulnerabilities were just the most attention-grabbing in a series of alarming revelations. Security flaws in, or successful hacks of, several major software products and platforms—including some used by Netflix, PayPal, Walmart, and other big names—were announced that same day. Yesterday, Quest Diagnostics, which runs lab tests for a third of American adults each year, disclosed that it, too, had been breached. When I asked Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, about the potential fallout from yet another hack—this one of the cloud platform Railway, which is used by Intuit and MGM Resorts, among others—he paused. “I didn’t see that one,” Rubin said. “It’s been quite a busy week.”Yet what’s most alarming about the past few days is that by next year, this stretch of incidents—which some security experts are calling “Black October”—may be remembered as normal, or even tame. “It’s going to feel like, over and over and over again, we’re finding more and more bugs in very critical pieces of software,” Matthew Prince, the CEO of the internet infrastructure and security company Cloudflare, told me. “This story, which feels unique and fresh right now—in a few months, it’s going to feel like we get one of these every week.”Prince said he knows of still more vulnerabilities that will be announced in the near future.
AI 代理现在可以作为一种廉价且几乎无限的黑客军队部署。鲁宾说，仅在过去几个月里，开源模型——可以免费下载且使用不受限制——已经在发现漏洞和自动化攻击方面变得非常出色。反过来，恶意网络活动的数量激增。更多网站将被篡改，更多个人信息将被窃取，勒索软件将大量蔓延。鲁宾告诉我，互联网正进入一个“痛苦谷”。当我向网络安全公司 CrowdStrike 的高级副总裁亚当·梅耶斯提出这可能成为新常态的担忧时，他说：“我认为实际上会变得更糟。”
For the next year or two, if not longer, the internet is going to feel a bit touch and go, and more dangerous than we’ve come to expect. “It’s going to feel like the sky is falling” for a while, Prince said. There’s a decades-long backlog of bugs in software written without much review or scrutiny—which was more or less fine so long as there was a very small number of skilled hackers. Over the past two decades, companies, governments, and individuals have been lulled into a false sense of security: Most people don’t think twice about punching credit-card numbers into the website of a local restaurant or gift shop, or forking over a home address and phone number in just about any customer survey. But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance.
以本周披露的另一批漏洞为例，针对 Node.js 程序的漏洞。该软件用于执行动态网页的 JavaScript 代码，被《财富》500 强公司以及使用 AI 开发的程序广泛使用。梅耶斯说：“这些就是网络运行的基础。”由于平台的使用方式，侵入仅一个使用 Node.js 的软件产品就可能感染数万家其他组织，鲁宾说，这被称为“供应链攻击”。
AI agents can now be deployed as a cheap and near-infinite hacker army. In just the past couple of months, Rubin said, open-source models—which can be downloaded for free and used without restrictions—have become very good at finding vulnerabilities and automating attacks. In turn, the amount of malicious cyber activity has spiked.
而发动网络攻击的技术门槛已几乎低得荒唐：CrowdStrike 将上月下旬针对韩国银行的一连串网络攻击归因于一名 26 岁的中国人。梅耶斯告诉我：“他获取所有数据后，转而询问 AI，‘我该如何变现？哪里可以卖掉？’”他“根本不知道自己在干什么”。梅耶斯说，CrowdStrike 正在检测“一个新的具备自主性的对手”——即 AI 驱动的黑客行动——“每两小时一次”。
应对这一局面需要几乎所有行业的快速且巨大的协同。例如，PHP 的漏洞数月前就已被一个由 AI 与网络安全公司组成的联盟发现。
More websites will be defaced, more personal information will be stolen, and ransomware will proliferate. Rubin told me that the internet is entering a “valley of pain.”When I posed the concern that this is the new normal to Adam Meyers, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, he told me, “I think it’s going to get a lot worse, actually.”
普林斯说，随后，“在过去的几个月里，我们和其他行业合作伙伴非常低调地努力，有效地落实了防护措施”——基本上就是临时防护，直到这些漏洞能够被完全解决。但“并非所有人都使用CloudFlare，也不是所有人都会迅速修补自己的软件。”我交谈过的一些网络安全专家对AI持乐观态度：他们认为，最终AI将被用来发现和解决许多重大的网络安全漏洞，互联网总体上将变得更加安全。
Consider, for instance, another set of vulnerabilities disclosed this week, to the program Node.js. This software, which executes JavaScript code for dynamic webpages, is widely used by Fortune 500 companies, as well as in programs developed with AI. “These are the things the web runs on,” Meyers said. Because of how the platform is used, compromising just one software product that uses Node.js could infect tens of thousands of other organizations, Rubin said, in what is known as a “supply-chain attack.”And the skill threshold for launching cyberattacks has become almost absurdly low: CrowdStrike tied a spate of cyberattacks on South Korean banks late last month to a 26-year-old in China. “After he got access to all the data, he turned around and asked AI, ‘How do I monetize this? Where can I sell this?’”Meyers told me. He “didn’t know what he was doing.”Meyers said CrowdStrike is detecting “a new agentic adversary”—that is, an AI-powered hacking operation—“every two hours.”Navigating this will require rapid and tremendous coordination from basically every sector.
但在那之前，我们可能会困在一个可怕的过渡期。“这将持续到重写并保护数十亿行一直存在这些漏洞的代码所需的时间为止，”AI公司Cognition的首席信息安全官、Facebook前首席安全官亚历克斯·斯塔莫斯告诉我。
For instance, the vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered months ago by a consortium of AI and cybersecurity firms. Then, “very quietly, for the last several months, we and other industry partners worked to effectively put in place protections,” Prince said—basically, temporary shields until the weaknesses could be fully addressed. But “not everybody uses CloudFlare, and not everybody is quick to patch their software.”Some of the cybersecurity experts I’ve spoken with are optimistic about AI: Eventually, they say, AI will be used to find and address many of the major cybersecurity flaws, and the internet will become much safer overall. But before then, we may be stuck in a terrible limbo. “This is going to last as long as it takes to rewrite and secure the billions of lines of code that have always had these vulnerabilities,” Alex Stamos, the chief information-security officer at the AI company Cognition and a former chief security officer at Facebook, told me.
即便网络安全专家急于借助AI来拯救互联网，这项技术也正在带来大量新问题。首先，所有“凭感觉编码”的应用都很可能包含安全漏洞。而在这个人们需要对自身数字卫生更加警惕的时刻，多位网络安全专家带着毫不掩饰的轻蔑提到了AI助手的广泛采用；正如鲁宾所说：“我们的同行正在使用Muse，并给它全权使用你的信用卡。”
And even as cybersecurity experts rush to leverage AI to save the internet, the technology is introducing plenty of new problems. All vibe-coded apps, for starters, are very likely to contain security flaws. And at a time when people need to be more vigilant about their digital hygiene, multiple cybersecurity experts brought up the widespread adoption of AI assistants with more than a hint of scorn; as Rubin put it: “Our peers are using Muse and giving it carte blanche to use your credit card.”
互联网正变得越来越狂野，而保障其安全的路径，本质上可能需要一种“修剪”。“你很可能会看到更多公司把不需要留在互联网上的服务下线，”网络安全公司Trail of Bits的首席执行官丹·吉多告诉我，让旧网页和表单贬值，使它们无法成为攻击目标。他补充说，个人可能会被鼓励删除未使用的浏览器扩展，这样“能访问你数据的软件就会更少”。
The internet is becoming a wilder place, and the path to secure it may require, in essence, a sort of pruning. “You’ll likely see more companies take services off the internet when they don’t need to be there,” depreciating old webpages and forms so they can’t be targeted, Dan Guido, the CEO of the cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits, told me. Individuals might be encouraged to delete unused browser extensions, he added, so that there are “fewer pieces of software that can access your data.”
斯塔莫斯说，总体而言，人们需要“对合作的公司更加挑剔”，而且“你不能再假设你使用的每个网站都是安全的”。你使用的那个宝可梦集换式卡牌网站、梦幻体育平台或观鸟论坛，可能会被黑，从而泄露你在别处重复使用的密码、信用卡号，或更糟的东西。我还听到的其他建议：不要自己托管电子邮件客户端来替代Gmail。
People in general need to be “more discerning of the companies they work with,” Stamos said, and “you’re just not gonna be able to assume every site you use is secure.”That Pokémon trading-card website, fantasy-sports platform, or birding forum you use could be hacked for a password you’ve reused elsewhere, or a credit-card number, or worse. Other advice I heard: Don’t host your own email client instead of Gmail.
不要在家里自己托管文件系统来替代使用云服务。谷歌和Dropbox有资源抵御汹涌而来的AI黑客攻击，而你没有。
Don’t host your own file system at home instead of using the cloud. Google and Dropbox have the resources to defend against an onslaught of AI hacks, and you don’t.
如果我们最终确实找到并修补了所有网络安全漏洞，结果可能是一个更开放的互联网，任何人都可以随时使用广泛可用的AI工具进行安全检查，你也会更放心地再次分享个人信息。但另一种可能是互联网变得更加集中化，只有大型软件提供商开发的服务和网站才被视为值得信赖和可靠。互联网需要新的围墙来抵御AI驱动的攻击。但反过来，我们可能也会感到被困在围墙之内。
If, eventually, we do find and shore up all of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities out there, the result could be a more open web, where anybody can use widely available AI tools to run security checks at any time and you’ll feel safer sharing your personal information again. But another possibility is an even more centralized internet, where only services and websites developed by large software providers are deemed trustworthy and reliable. The internet needs new walls to defend against AI-powered attacks. But in turn, we might also feel walled in.