Brain Teaser: Can you decipher this cybersecurity riddle?

Detailed summary

One major product written in PHP is an open-source web page management system, initially made for blogs, that is now the backbone of an estimated 40 percent of all websites on the…

Recently, the National Security Agency made an unusual suggestion. It recommended that websites running on the coding language PHP go offline until a newer, patched-up version of PHP could be installed. It was no small ask. Some three-quarters of the internet uses the programming language.

A few days prior, two cybersecurity companies using AI had uncovered serious security vulnerabilities that had lurked in PHP unnoticed for decades. The risk was serious enough that several European governments took down sites and Wikipedia temporarily shut down. Many school websites, open-source resources, and even some games went offline.

One major product written in PHP is an open-source web page management system, initially made for blogs, that is now the backbone of an estimated 40 percent of all websites on the internet. Its name is the inspiration for this puzzle.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Boston Globe. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.