In Other News · United States · Technology

Source: Axios

The cybersecurity world braced for catastrophe after AI uncovered critical flaws in the web's foundational code, but the anticipated wave of automated attacks has surprisingly struggled to get off the ground.Why it matters: Millions of hacking attempts have so far yielded few successful attacks, an apparent lucky break due to the degree of difficulty of building attacks on the bugs. The defense work at many companies to address the issue also appears to have helped.The last week has unfolded in ways that remind some researchers of the Y2K phenomenon, a software problem in 1999 where warnings of armageddon helped rally companies to engineer a solution in time.Driving the news: Security researchers say the PHP vulnerabilities that prompted widespread panic last week have proven unusually difficult to exploit, despite a flood of attempts to develop working attack code.Yet the difficulty of exploiting PHP shouldn't be mistaken for evidence that AI-powered hacking isn't a serious threat, Samantha Lewis, head of threat intelligence at Armadin, told Axios."We don't have to wait another two years before this happens (again)," she said. "It could be three hours from now that the next one of these launches."Between the lines: The sheer volume of AI-discovered bugs means...