PHP

So I would build simple tools, fun games, and so on.

Started with C++, over time moved to Java, then started moving to web development, moved to PHP, and built a lot of web applications.

Then in my college, I with a bunch of folks, like-minded folks started a college group called SDS Labs.

The idea was that people who wanted to code could sit together and build applications for the institute.

Hi, Matt.

Welcome, everyone, to the very first PHP Foundation Community Hour.

I am here.

I'm Elizabeth Barron, the executive director of the foundation, and I'm here with Matt Stauffer, who is the CEO of Titan and also on the board of directors for the foundation.

But even more helpful, I think, is to have a purpose and like a reason to be hanging out with each other and not just for no reason, just sitting there on a Zoom call randomly.

So So that's why we kind of evolved this.

And then the kind folks at PHP Architect offered to provide the platform, the infrastructure.

And shout out to Joe Ferguson, who is also producing this behind the scenes.

WordPress is one part of a relatively large stack of things that are used to deliver that kind of end product that you're talking about, Kurt, right? Like we're, we're, we're building this site or this app or this service or whatever it is, and WordPress is one part in that stack.

And, and below that, there's stuff that has to do with hosting and the, the web server and things like PHP and the database and, and, um, network level stuff even.

Um, and then you get up to WordPress eventually, and above that are all the like plugins and theme and things that allow, um, your, your system to actually work and do the thing that it wants.

Um, and WordPress, that one thin layer that is just like WordPress core, is actually quite secure with an extremely good long track record of staying that way.

Now, we have grown beyond that, but that is still probably our flagship capability.

We, we, um, detect and remediate more malware than, than anyone else.

Um, but, you know, you start by removing the malware, and then you say, "Well, how's that getting there?" And you, you know, you sort of move into the, the next layer up, looking at the, the runtime when, you know, PHP is actually writing the file to disk and being able to prevent that from happening.

Um, and then stepping up into things like, well, when someone's doing that several times in a row, we should just block them at that network layer, and so our smart WAF does that.

I know.

And then I moved on to do PHP work, which I mean, it's not far from Scala, if we're being honest.

And I think that was when I was like, hey, listen, I've done Python.

I jumped around mostly back in web development, mainly.

Writing the code was never the hard part there.

I mean, it was built in PHP.

Myself and my brother did it.

Mostly he did it actually, and he was six months into learning to be a software engineer at the time.

Again, not very good in the imagination, so I typically picked things that already existed and gone and reproduced them and figured out how to do interesting challenges with them.

Sometimes it was, you know, I'm gonna clone this tool then figure out, how do I build it faster for the fairly specific bit? 'Cause I wanna, you know, learn about optimizing code perhaps, or I wanna learn this faster programming language.

So I'd done several of these projects time and time again over the last 30 years to learn either Visual Basic or PHP or C or C++ or Java or C# or Rust or Go.

So that's what it was about.

One campaign used it to plant a backdoor.

A second attacker was seen deploying a small PHP web shell with different tooling.

CISA added the issue to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog on September eighth.

Applying the patch closes the entry point, but it doesn't remove access an attacker may already have established.

I didn't do...

I always, like, worked, I always programmed my way through Objective-C through college, did a lot of PHP and MySQL, stuff like that.

But luckily I, I don't know if I would've still loved it the way I do today.

I don't know if I had to sit through classes and stuff.

Oh, that, that was right at a time when there was a lot of, like, casual Flash games going on, I know.

So you could, you could pick up on them on, like, PHP message boards and stuff.

Well, well that was the, the-

No, that wasn't even, that wasn't even Flash yet.