Earlier this week there was a high profile news story about PHP versions. As one of the hosting companies says “Another day, another vulnerability” typically these changes are managed in the background every week now.
The reality is that your hosting company or IT manager is doing a series of security and performance updates nearly every week. That is the nature of technology now.
I use a number of server hosts and depending on the product they have been busy making updates available. As explained to a client.
These potential system issues happen every week in the background and so there are always a series of background updates going on.You don’t hear about that because it is like housekeeping but it likely means you might need a managed service because the days of “set & forget” tech services are long gone.
One of my favourite NZ hosts for smaller projects is Myhost ( part of Sitehost). Their regular headline is “Another day, another vulnerability”. Yes the latest PHP one was high profile but this all gets managed.
The advent of AI systems from Google and others has also brought many changes. One of those is that some of the “bad actors” now use the same AI tools to commit crimes. Often they see a web-server as “free resources” and they use your web-server to send out spam and other criminal behaviour or worse.
Hopefully once AI tokens cost something then some of that activity will scale down but the short version is that this means it some security dramas might get exploited more quickly than in the pre-AI era. Previously scripts were used by crims before but now that smarter bots and potentially agents are being used one the results may be a rise in security related problems.
Most websites are now AI “friendly” for search engines but there has been a transition going on for the past 2 or so years. But because AI apps have been free it is generally a cowboy universe and there have been loads of unintended consequences.
FYI – PHP is part of the server tech stack (LAMP) where P is PHP. If your server uses PHP then these are the main patched versions. In some cases the same versions have been backported so the version number alone might not be enough to tell generally these 4 versions are the safest ones in October 2026.
“PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution”
Did Timmy fall down the well? Apparently in 500 episodes of Lassie he did not. This PHP story is a bit like that. There are millions and millions of websites and some of them will have security breaches but most of the time the IT managers or Hosting companies will have completed their safety work in the background and everything will continue to be safe.
