Cybersecurity’s Black October: How to protect yourself

Cybersecurity professionals are having a brutal month.

What’s being dubbed Black October isn’t even over, and it’s already brought about several dozen major cyberattacks and AI-identified vulnerabilities across the internet.

When critical vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language used by around 70% of websites, were uncovered with the help of AI tools and disclosed by the PHP Foundation on Oct. 21, the race to patch servers around the world began.

Cloud services provider Cloudflare reported millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerability after its disclosure, following thousands of attempts in the preceding hours.

Some countries, including France and Finland, temporarily pulled access to certain websites while the US National Security Agency (NSA) warned organizations to patch the flaws immediately or take affected systems offline.

“We are at Security Armageddon now,” said NEAR founder Illia Polosukhin. Anthropic’s chief security adviser Jason Clinton warned that, “as bad as things have gotten in the past 4 days, they are going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

Citizens of the United Kingdom are even being urged to “be ready” for an emergency, such as severe weather or cyberattacks, that could cut off access to critical infrastructure such as water, electricity or the internet. US military installation have been told to prep for 90 days of independent operation under the FORTRESS initiative.