Wiz CTO Says AI Helped Discover Critical PHP Vulnerabilities
TechCrunch AI’s Equity podcast reports that Wiz CTO Tomer Schwartz said AI and custom tooling tested dozens of ideas over a weekend and were necessary for his team to find two critical PHP vulnerabilities. The bugs prompted organizations to patch systems, with some taking sites offline; researchers also warned that AI may accelerate the discovery and exploitation of new vulnerabilities.
The interview provides first-hand insight into AI-assisted vulnerability discovery and coordinated patching involving Wiz, OpenAI, Calif and the PHP team, while Schwarz’s assessment that AI was indispensable remains a vendor claim.
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The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched. According to researchers who found the bugs, this is only the beginning, as AI changes how quickly novel vulnerabilities can be uncovered and exploited.
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks with Tomer Schwartz, CTO of Exposure Management & AppSec at Google-owned Wiz, who was part of the scramble — alongside OpenAI, research group Calif, and the PHP team — to fix the bugs. On the show, Schwartz and Bellan get into what the race looked like from the inside, how early-stage startups can build with security in mind, and why patching by hand won’t scale.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Why Tomer says Wiz couldn’t have found these bugs without AI, and how custom tooling tested dozens of ideas over a weekend.
- How a bug was able to sit in plain sight for more than a decade, and what changed to make it exploitable.
- Why leaks are almost baked into coordinated disclosure, and how Wiz planned for it.
- Who’s still unpatched and whether small business owners running WordPress sites need to worry.
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