Comment by bunderbunder
7 hours ago
There is an argument to be made that taking down such a sizable chunk of the Internet automatically qualifies it as a pretty severe vulnerability, even if no actual exploits were involved in causing it.
More seriously, though, I read it as bad because of the potential. All versions of PHP going back a full two decades were affected, all users of PHP are affected regardless of which features they use, and it’s still unclear if there’s an effective mitigation. So the blast radius if anyone does/did have a working exploit would have been enormous.
I'm in charge of my employer's ecommerce website. To me there's a critical difference in severity between a RCE vulnerability and being to takedown/crash a website.
This is all hindsight talking. You act on the information as it becomes available. At the moment, the being safe than sorry rule applied.
It didn't 'take down a sizable chunk of the Internet'. Site owners took down their sites because of FUD and mass hysteria.
It's not getting tripped by "mass hysteria" to be careful and go offline for a couple hours.
Your average site is fine at 99.9% uptime.
We do need to eventually see the proof that this was so urgent. Because if it wasn't then this was effectively a massive DOS attack on society.
"9.2" is a big claim and a powerful justification for action, but with OpenAI involved my faith is very low that this isn't largely a publicity stunt. Especially given the age of the vulnerability.
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It's risk assessment, nothing more. Some weighed the risk high and paused their site. Nothing wrong with that and not hysteria or FUD.
I think the article is suggesting that a sober risk assessment was not done by most folks period, not that they merely perceived the risk differently.
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