Cybersecurity Panic, Nationalizing AI, The Model Squeeze & Can't Own Anything

So if you guys...

I would assume people have seen what's happening, but maybe I will give a very quick overview, which is I open my feed.

I'll give it from my perspective, and then, Zaki, we need your help explaining what's actually happening here.

So I, like everyone else, opens my feed.

I see the NSA tweeting out that all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update.

So I see that... you know, other people are tweeting that there's this huge hack that's happening.

The

craziest one was the prime minister of Japan tweeted

the prime minister of Japan tweets out.

So, you know, I think that, uh, I think that what happened this week, it is very clear to everybody that there was some huge cyber attack.

And I think there's some very small amount of people who actually understand what happened.

And I think many people just Googled what is PHP and what is Node.js in that moment and then said, well, what actually happened with these two things? So, Zaki, maybe give us the rundown for Empire listeners who are less in the cybersecurity world.

Yeah, okay.

PHP is a programming language for building web applications.

Probably the most famous application built with PHP is Facebook.

And then probably after that is WordPress, which if you had a blog and like, The last 20 years, you probably used WordPress at one point or another.

So like most people are familiar with those two things.

There's some large percentage of, you know, of websites on the internet, like 70% use PHP.

And the AIs found, figured out how to exploit a bug that people had known about since 2004.

But there had never been any sort of attack or exploit associated with it.

GPT-5-6 sole, ChatGPT's model, found a way to exploit this vulnerability several months ago.

There was a collaborative disclosure and patching process that was going on.

Then it got leaked somehow that this bug, what the exploit was.

And so there was this mad scramble to do a big announcement and patch and disclosure day yesterday.

which a lot of these websites, no one has ever, no one was actively looking after them.