The Vulnerability Apocalypse and Why We Should Fund Open Source

If you use the internet at all, you may have noticed that a large percentage of sites suddenly went down earlier this week—and all your nerdiest friends were talking about "The Vulnerability Apocalypse” and this thing called PHP that powers nearly 70% of the websites on the internet. You may find yourself wondering: what is PHP, what just happened, what is the vulnerability apocalypse, and what do I need to do?  

To find out what you can personally do read the first blog post in this series!  

PHP is a programming language used mainly to create interactive websites. Facebook, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Etsy, and other major sites all use or were originally built on PHP. It is a long-established mainstay of web development. But because it is open-source, maintenance of these critical systems depends on a small number of volunteers working on this in their free time. The disaster scenario that happened this past week is the perfect example of why we need more money and people supporting open-source projects. Corporations should be contributing both. 

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are the way that security professionals file reports about vulnerabilities in software. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD), run by NIST, is the official national database of CVEs. In other words, CVE reports managed by NIST are the closest thing we have to a canonical database of security vulnerabilities in software. The NVD currently has around 400,000 CVEs that have been filed and accepted since 1988. In just the month of October, 13,000 new CVEs have been submitted. This means that 3% of critical software security bugs that have ever been officially logged were found in the last month alone. And it's likely that by the end of the year over a quarter of the software vulnerabilities that have ever been found will be from 2026.  

Computer vulnerabilities reported are rising exponentially. Source: CVE Tracker