As AI exposes flaws in IT systems and geopolitics plays out on the cyber frontline, some experts say the events of recent weeks could soon be a common occurrence

Alex Pearce was doing the morning rounds at his fruit and vegetable wholesale business in London on Monday last week when he noticed something odd.

The defrost light on refrigeration unit 2 was on, and the panel reading was 150C. Unit 4 was the same.

David Gibson says the problem is that details of the flaw were revealed before it was fixed, while Charles MacKinnon notes that we are at the mercy of technology we don’t understand

Chris Stokel-Walker may be right (The internet has broken – again. Shouldn’t the tech firms that make billions from it pay to fix it?, 22 October), but the real issue lies elsewhere. The bugs in the PHP programming language that were recently found by an AI tool have been present for a long time without anybody noticing and without any harm being done – they are extremely obscure.

They were not found by hackers – they were found because an AI tool was used to check the PHP source code, which is a good use of AI.

‘Session cookies’ are a primary target for hackers letting them hijack and use your accounts

You’ve had a busy morning of life admin, logging into various accounts to check balances and make payments. At the end of a productive few hours you close your laptop and move on to your next job.

What you don’t know is that fraudsters have hijacked your session with the bank and are now able to access your account. You are the victim of cookie theft, which belongs to a type of fraud known as “session hijacking”.

The current US administration is an obstacle, but public demand for protection will ultimately prevail

Organisations around the world scrambled on Thursday to fix critical flaws in PHP, the software that powers much of the web. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to take control of affected servers. Some websites were taken offline as a precaution while fixes were installed. The paradox is that while AI helped researchers uncover the flaw, it also threatens to accelerate the ability to exploit it. Amazon said that it had detected an attempt before the public disclosure of the PHP flaws.

What the episode highlights is AI’s central role in security – and not always for the right reasons. OpenAI’s models have also been responsible for two alarming hacks this year – a security breach of an Australian health department website and a raid by a swarm of AI bots on Hugging Face, an AI services platform. Citing those incidents, the AI minister, Kanishka Narayan, warned that a similar cyber-attack on the UK is “likely, if not inevitable”.

Websites around the world have been taken offline as governments and businesses scramble to fix a flaw in the computer language PHP. There are fears that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal data, take control of web servers and disrupt services. Millions of attempts have already been made to attack websites since the issue with the programming language was revealed, cybersecurity companies have said. Michael Safi speaks to global technology reporter Aisha Down

Websites around the world have been taken offline as governments and businesses scramble to fix a flaw in the computer language PHP. There are fears that hackers could exploit the vulnerability to steal data, take control of web servers and disrupt services. Millions of attempts have already been made to attack websites since the issue with the programming language was revealed, cybersecurity companies have said. Michael Safi speaks to global technology reporter Aisha Down – watch on YouTube

We’d like to hear from small businesses that have been affected by the PHP code flaw. Did you have to take you website offline? Did you manage to patch the fault?

Websites around the world have been hit by millions of attempts to exploit a recently discovered vulnerability in their code, cybersecurity companies have said, as the US National Security Agency warned the flaw could allow attackers to take control of web servers, steal data and disrupt services.

The problem in the PHP programming language, which underpins about 70% of the world’s websites, emerged on Wednesday causing governments and companies to pull their websites off the internet before they could be attacked and so they could patch the fault.

I’ve been banging the drum about these vulnerabilities for years. It will take more than a handful of exhausted developers to keep us safe

Parts of the internet are going dark. In the Netherlands, government websites, including its digital ID login service, have become unavailable. Finland has taken public services offline, and Wikimedia, the organisation behind Wikipedia, has switched off some of its systems too.

This sounds like the results of a cyber-attack. In most instances, however, the people running the sites deliberately switched them off because the alternative – keeping them online – was too risky. The future is here, and suddenly much of our digital infrastructure is looking very fragile.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Problem in language that underpins 70% of sites has led governments and companies to pull sites offline to patch fault

• Tell us: have you been affected by the PHP code flaw?

• What is PHP, and how bad is the computer language flaw causing website shutdowns globally?

Websites around the world have been hit by millions of attempts to exploit a recently discovered vulnerability in their code, cybersecurity companies have said, as the US warned the flaw could allow attackers to take control of web servers, steal data and disrupt services.

The problem in the PHP programming language, which underpins about 70% of the world’s websites, emerged on Wednesday causing governments and companies to pull their websites off the internet before they could be attacked and so they could patch the fault.

An estimated 70% of websites use the open-source language. What is the identified vulnerability in it?

Website owners faced millions of attempts to exploit a serious security vulnerability in their programming language, it has emerged, triggering a rush by governments and businesses to fix the problem.

The newly discovered vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that underpins most websites, allows hackers to carry out cyber-attacks and steal data if not fixed. What were the vulnerabilities and why did they affect so many sites?

Precautionary takedowns come as experts say bad actors could exploit vulnerability in language used by 70% of sites

Websites around the globe have gone dark after a serious vulnerability was found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web.

Belgian, Dutch, Finnish, French and German sites were among those that governments took down temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites.

The tech company says successful AI worms need more capability on less powerful devices, but current trends make that feasible by the end of the year

Warnings about what artificial intelligence might do in the future – together with alarming reports of what it has gotten up to already – are being issued so quickly that even security experts have difficulty triaging what to worry about.

Yet a report this week from Anthropic’s offensive research team grabbed attention by describing a new, practical threat, one devoid of human characteristics or apocalyptic musings. The red team, as such internal testers are called, said it created a malicious AI program that spread autonomously through internet-connected “smart” televisions and could do the same inside other ordinary devices. While machines running AI usually need a fair amount of computing power, the researchers said that their program split parts of itself among 15 televisions and was still able to function by using a bit of power from each.

Whether it was youngsters proving their skills or state sabotage, Europe’s most hacked country was left with a mountain of waste after food began cooking in freezers

Shortly before midnight last Sunday, the digital thermostats controlling hundreds of supermarket cold aisles across France began to flicker and rise.

In a “bizarre and unprecedented” cyber-attack, hackers had remotely overridden the temperature settings on thousands of freezers, fridges and chiller cabinets pushing them from as low as -27C (-16.6F) to well over 50C (122F).

Kanishka Narayan, concerned by Australian incident, says British cyber defences could be bypassed by artificial intelligence agent

• UK politics live – latest updates

An AI-driven cyber-attack similar to the OpenAI breach of Australia’s healthcare system is likely, “if not inevitable”, in the UK, according to a senior minister.

Kanishka Narayan, the UK AI minister, indicated that the British government’s own cyber defences would be bypassed by a technology that has developed highly sophisticated skills in cybersecurity.

Shares in fashion company fall nearly 10% after its app systems are accessed by ‘unidentified third party’

Asos is investigating unauthorised access to its app system after shoppers received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” its data.

The online fashion retailer said basic personal information including name and contact details might have been accessed by an unidentified third party but it did not believe payment card records or passwords had been compromised.

Exclusive: Official UK security assessment found Microsoft cloud platform storing files was at potential risk from hostile hackers

Vast troves of highly sensitive police data are lying on Microsoft cloud platforms which an official UK security assessment deemed to be vulnerable to “compromise” by foreign actors and the US government, a Guardian investigation can reveal.

The files include criminal records, victim statements, internal emails and sensitive information held by more than 40 police forces across the UK.

Undisclosed number of names and contact and reservation details accessed in latest cybercrime attempt

The accommodation reservation website Booking.com has suffered a data breach with “unauthorised parties” gaining access to customers’ details.

The platform said it “noticed some suspicious activity involving unauthorised third parties being able to access some of our guests’ booking information”.

Russian state has tolerated parallel probiv market for its convenience but now Ukrainian spies are exploiting it

Russia is scrambling to rein in the country’s sprawling illicit market for leaked personal data, a shadowy ecosystem long exploited by investigative journalists, police and criminal groups.

For more than a decade, Russia’s so-called probiv market – a term derived from the verb “to pierce” or “to punch into a search bar” – has operated as a parallel information economy built on a network of corrupt officials, traffic police, bank employees and low-level security staff willing to sell access to restricted government or corporate databases.

Kensington and Westminster councils investigating whether data has been compromised as Hammersmith and Fulham also reports hack

Three London councils have reported a cyber-attack, prompting the rollout of emergency plans and the involvement of the National Crime Agency (NCA) as they investigate whether any data has been compromised.

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and Westminster city council, which share some IT infrastructure, said a number of systems had been affected across both authorities, including phone lines. The councils shut down several computerised systems as a precaution to limit further possible damage.

When courts ban people from accessing leaked data – as happened after the airline’s data breach – only hackers and scammers win

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

It’s become the playbook for big Australian companies that have customer data stolen in a cyber-attack: call in the lawyers and get a court to block anyone from accessing it.

Qantas ran it after suffering a major cybersecurity attack that accessed the frequent flyer details of 5 million customers.