The recent news of a potential security exploit in PHP made headlines recently no doubt after having been discovered by Artificial Intelligence.

It appears that it was very obscure, complicated but ubiquotous to all PHP versions. Most providers will have published fixes available to adminstrators. It also looks like it had never been used by bad actors.

If you are adminstering WordPress or other PHP based applications now is a good time to go into your web admin and just refresh your memory on how to update the PHP versions on your estate.

I posted some more detailed instructions on my companion site (sometime ago)

I’ve since gone through and updated all my PHP versions. Took me half an hour for about 60 sites. I have not heard of any bad actors actively using the exploit but its nice to be thorough.

It is also a great advert for obscurity and obfiscation as a default security principle – remember that recommendation to change the default login url of your wordpress sites!