Researcher pushes back on 'worst day in cybersecurity history' claims about php2shell

joshua_saxe · x · 2026-10-23

AI safety researcher Joshua Saxe argues that calling php2shell 'the worst day in cybersecurity history' needs justification against historical baselines: celebrity vulns and exploit PoCs, serious TCP/IP/DNS protocol bugs, worm outbreaks, nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, kernel packet-parsing bugs, and the post-2022 spread of AI social-engineering and hacking tools. Without a clear technical mechanism explaining why this is worse, he says, the argument isn't serious — and such alarmism distracts from the real, looming AI-driven security crisis that needs proper risk models.

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