Communicating Through a Cyber Crisis: Building Trust Before, During and After the Breach

So the biggest news this week, of course, is that a bunch of websites have been taken down, taken down by the people who own them, which is unusual.

Sometimes we hear about websites being taken over or crashing or whatever, but these have been taken down on purpose because of PHP and a vulnerability, which, of course, AI discovered.

Now, PHP, as you will know, Sophie, is a very common term programming language that's used for lots of internet sites around the world um more than i thought i thought we'd moved on a bit but quotes are sort of 70 percent of all sites are using it um and i was i was a little surprised about that i thought i'd seen lots new technologies coming on but maybe there are just a little bit of vestiges of php floating around anyway it's been around forever so you wouldn't think it would have any vulnerabilities but i I managed to find a couple of doozies.

So lots of people have been, as a precaution, taking their websites down.

You followed this one, Sophie?

I have, absolutely.

It's really interesting.

I think it is touted as one of the sort of most set of, because there were two of them, weren't there, sort of the most serious vulnerabilities that were identified by AI.

And it was open AI tools that were used in the identification of them by cybersecurity researchers.

Yeah, I had the 70% statistic as well, which is it's a fair old chunk of the Internet.

And I think the headlines, Cloudflare came out and said, we've started to see some early attacks happening.

And I think Finland took down all of their government web services.

Wikipedia went down.

Apparently, this was left undetected for over a decade.

And it was just a couple of weeks that these researchers were using the AI tools before they discovered them, which is a little bit intimidating, but obviously raises lots of different questions.

I think particularly in light of conversation we were touching on recently about sort of the power, but also the risks of vibe coding.

You know, how many people who have put systems together who don't have that in-depth understanding would have sort of the awareness that actually this is relevant to me.

I need to take my website down and start thinking about how I can implement this patch.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think one of the reasons that there's such a percentage of websites is that WordPress, which is a very, very popular CMS website content generation platform, uses PHP.

And as a result of that, there'll be lots of people who sort of have websites but don't know what the underlying language is.

I mean, you could call that vibe coding almost, Sophie, right? They're generating these websites without writing any code whatsoever.

Yeah.

But the thing that does that has got possibly this infection.

I've, for various organizations, you know, small clubs and stuff like that, sports things, et cetera, et cetera, I've created websites using WordPress.