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.

Separate actions also take place outside fence and across Europe in backlash against impact of AI boom

Activists have stormed the site of a Microsoft datacentre being built in Amsterdam, as the backlash to the social and environmental harms of the AI boom spreads across Europe.

Protesters from Geef Tegengas, a Dutch direct action group, clashed with police while breaking into a construction site at Westpoort, Amsterdam, where some members climbed a crane, lit flares and tied helium balloons to equipment.

National Cyber Security Centre expects attacks on critical facilities such as power stations, airports and hospitals

AI-powered malicious software is “highly likely” to be used in hacking attacks against the UK’s power stations, airports and hospitals by 2028, according to the state cybersecurity body.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said AI will probably enable a ransomware attack against critical national infrastructure [CNI] between now and 2028. The UK’s definition of CNI covers a range of facilities and services across sectors including energy, transport, defence, food, health and finance.

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.

Information released by Distributed Denial of Secrets is the third such government data disclosure in the last month

Data identifying more than 41,000 employees and contractors for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was released on Wednesday in an unprecedented leak that reveals how the agency is organized. The records, which were made public by the transparency non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets, reference operation names, surveillance programs and information on undercover initiatives.

The DHS did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

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”.

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.

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.

In the west the technology comes with at least some effort to provide security and a benign intent – not so from China

There is much to fear from artificial intelligence developed in China and handed to businesses and governments in the west almost free of charge.

Every month Chinese AI developers such as DeepSeek and Xiaomi dispatch the latest versions of their “open-weight” models that allow users to take the core software and use it without paying an expensive ongoing licence.

Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors

“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.

It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.

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.

Appointment or renewal reminder appears in victims’ calendar to lure them into logging in to fake Google, Microsoft or PayPal page

You’re preparing for the week ahead and take a look at your Google calendar. There’s an entry for a meeting that you must have completely forgotten. The note that pops up when you click on it says you’ll be reviewing a project and includes a link to more details. Confused, you follow it to find out more; the website you land on asks for logon details, and you provide them.

Unfortunately, this was not a failure of your memory but a calendar phishing scam. You have handed your name and password to fraudsters who will sell it on in a batch with other people’s details, use it to break into your work email, or to persuade you that they are contacting you from your bank, or another institution.

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.

David Robinson joins other insiders in urging industry to take more care over rapidly developing technology

A safety leader at OpenAI has quit the company, warning that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied the ChatGPT developer’s product releases, explained his resignation in an essay headlined: “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken.”

Former deputy PM now involved in tech industry says many within sector are ‘winding themselves up into a lather’

Nick Clegg has dismissed fears over AI’s “godlike power to exterminate humanity”, calling it a sign that tech bosses are “breathing their own fumes”.

The former UK deputy prime minister said that tech bosses should focus on addressing known specific threats such as cybersecurity and bioweapons rather than the “slightly hand-wavy view that this technology is unavoidably going to develop some godlike power which is going to turn on us and exterminate humanity”.

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.

US cybersecurity researchers who conducted hack say ‘scope of what we could theoretically access was huge’

Cybersecurity researchers have hacked into OpenAI with the help of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, in the latest example of security issues at the company.

A team at a US-based startup compromised a number of OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, starting a process that enabled them to access their target’s software cache – and potentially more.

Model adopting ‘jailbreak-like instructions’ among six more cases as firm reveals framework for tracking AI misalignment

OpenAI has disclosed six more examples of “unexpected or concerning” behaviour by its technology, as it warned that the pace of development could not continue at “maximum speed for much longer” responsibly.

In one of the new cases reported by OpenAI, an unreleased research model inserted “jailbreak-like instructions” into its own notes to disregard its normal constraints and told itself to be “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots”.