AI Is a Double-Edged Sword in Cybersecurity as PHP Exploits Mount
AI is speeding flaw discovery for defenders and attackers alike, as recent PHP exploits show, pushing firms toward cyber resilience.
Security researchers used OpenAI Group PBC’s GPT-5.6 Sol to scan PHP’s code base for bugs, the report said. PHP powers up to 70% of global websites. The scan found critical vulnerabilities, and organizations have been scrambling to patch them.
Amazon.com Inc. disclosed last week that attackers began targeting PHP vulnerabilities four days before patches were released, and exploit attempts seen by Cloudflare Inc. have since climbed into the millions, according to the report.
The PHP case came as Microsoft Corp.’s monthly report listed 1,453 new vulnerabilities in October alone, the report said. AI models have dramatically increased the ability to analyze and potentially exploit weaknesses.
“AI changes the whole game,” Steve Kenniston, senior cybersecurity evangelist for portfolio marketing at Dell, told theCUBE. He cited model inferencing, model training data, systems where people can do things such as prompt injection, and identity management as areas that need attention.
Dell has been using frontier models to build defenses. The company is a participant in Anthropic PBC’s Project Glasswing, which gives vetted organizations access to powerful AI tools to secure critical systems. The project is intended to bring together organizations whose software supports critical infrastructure and could lead to catastrophic results if successfully attacked.
The rise of AI agents has also brought renewed scrutiny to identity in enterprise systems. Easier access to AI tools by threat actors has changed the rules of engagement for access management and detection.
“Undoubtedly the cost of entry and the barriers to entry have crumbled,” said John Scimone, president and chief security officer of Dell, who spoke recently with theCUBE. “Said another way, the least sophisticated attack tomorrow is more sophisticated than the world will have ever seen a year ago.”
Enterprises also face attacks that arrive with no warning, unlike hurricanes or tsunamis for which warning systems exist in many parts of the world, according to the report. That has placed greater emphasis on recovery and resilience.
“There’s no prediction here,” said Joseph D’Angelo, director of product management at InfoScale, in a recent conversation with theCUBE. “So, the only way to protect yourself is to ensure that you have what we like to call a defensible recovery posture.” D’Angelo said the approach requires understanding the state of applications.
At Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas earlier this year, the message was that data protection and cyber resilience have emerged as foundational control layers for enterprise AI, according to theCUBE Research’s Krista Case.
Case said cyber recovery capabilities are tied to resilience, AI governance, data integrity and operational trust, in a world where enterprise AI systems are only as reliable as the data pipelines, runtime controls and recovery processes supporting them. She said cyber resilience and AI infrastructure platforms are expanding beyond backup and recovery into metadata visibility, recovery validation and contextual understanding of enterprise data.
Editor's Summary
Frontier AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery on both sides of cybersecurity, as the PHP case shows attackers moving before patches were broadly available. Security vendors and researchers are responding by emphasizing cyber resilience, identity controls and validated recovery rather than relying only on prevention.