Every Gate Gets Tried

Issue 22

The Headline Story

Somebody at your yard locks the gate every night. The guy who drives the industrial park after dark isn’t looking for your yard in particular; he’s trying every gate, and the one left open gets cleaned out. Your website has a gate too, and this week far more people started trying it.

On Wednesday the people who maintain PHP, the software running underneath about seven in ten websites, including every WordPress site, released emergency fixes for two flaws that let an attacker take over an unpatched web server without a password. Attacks started before the fix was out; Amazon’s security team traced attempts back to October 17. Exposure depends on your PHP version and whether your host has patched it. Updating WordPress won’t fix it; the fix is on the server, which your host or developer runs.

The AI part cuts both ways. AI helped find the flaws: a security firm called Calif found one using an OpenAI model, and OpenAI says AI got there before attackers did. The same week, Reuters reported on one hacker who pointed AI agents, software that works through a task on its own, at more than 1,200 websites and got into more than 100 companies’ sites. The researcher who studied it put the AI bill for the whole campaign at about $5,000, roughly $50 for each site it got into.

Small businesses have always been targets, but the owner of a $30 million yard could tell himself his website wasn’t worth a skilled attacker’s time; they went after banks and big retailers. That assumption was always a gamble. Now it’s a bad one. When a break-in costs fifty dollars of AI time, nobody has to pick targets. They try every gate, including the one in front of your credit application and contractor login.

What Else Mattered

In Issue 21 I said I was watching ChatGPT fill out web forms for its users. This week the big sites picked sides. Walmart opened a front door for shopping assistants on Wednesday. Next month each one gets its own profile in the customer’s account, with a spending limit or approval on every order. Amazon has been blocking them. Big banks found outside assistants working inside customer accounts. Morgan Stanley is blocking them, and most banks are leaning toward letting them look but not move money. Your contractor portal will face the same choice.

Correction to Issue 21: Meta now says its new business terms take effect November 20, not October 30. Same three moves, three more weeks.

The Pattern Behind the Week

Software got cheap enough to try every door. Attackers use it to rattle every website gate at once. Customers use it to walk into store and bank accounts on their own behalf. Walmart, Amazon and the banks each decided which doors open and how far.

You already think this way about the yard. You know who has a key, which gate stays open after hours, and who can drive off with material without a ticket. Your website, customer portal and bill-pay page need the same answers. Until somebody decides, the answer is whatever your vendor set up years ago.

What to Do Now

1. Tomorrow morning, have whoever handles your website send your host or developer three questions. Is our site patched against the October 21 PHP flaws, and on what date? Have you checked for a break-in since October 17? If our version is too old for a standard fix, what’s protecting us now, and when do we upgrade? Your job is getting the answers in writing; theirs is knowing what they mean. If the answer is “we’re looking into it,” call again Tuesday, and Wednesday if you have to. Ask the same of every outside company running a page with your name on it: online store, credit application, bill pay.
2. Once the host confirms the fix, change the passwords on your website admin login and hosting account, turn on the second step that sends a code to a phone, and delete any admin login nobody can name.
3. Then ask whoever runs your contractor portal or online ordering, often your ERP vendor: when a customer’s AI assistant logs in with his username and password, what can it do? See statements? Place orders? Change a ship-to address? Write your rule in three lines: what an assistant can see, what it can order and up to what dollar amount, and what always needs one of your people. Look-only is a fine start, if it’s written down.

What I’m Watching

• Assistants that ask first. Anthropic’s new Duet, an assistant that works in the background across a person’s apps, waits for the user’s OK before it sends a message, pays, signs or deletes anything. That’s the answer I asked Microsoft for in Issue 18 about its Autopilot. My question is whether asking first becomes the norm.
• Assistants paying your invoices. Visa, BILL and Billtrust started a live test this week in which a buyer’s AI pays invoices the buyer already approved, straight through the supplier’s payment portal. If your builders pay you through a portal, I’ll be tracking how fast that reaches them.

One Question Worth Asking

When did someone last tell you, in writing, that your website was patched?