Wiz CTO Tomer Schwartz said the company would not have found PHP2Shell without AI, and warned that the vulnerability is not a one-off. Speaking on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, he said most websites still have not been patched and that major flaws of this kind are likely to show up more often in the weeks and months ahead.
AI expanded the output of researchers
Schwartz said that even if Wiz assigned its 10 best vulnerability researchers to a bug like this, the work could take months, or even 12 months, and still might not produce a result. With PHP2Shell, the company used AI to pursue many possible lines of inquiry at the same time, then had researchers review and verify the most important findings.
According to Schwartz, Wiz built that workflow around Atlas, an internal framework layered on top of frontier models from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Each researcher comes up with 20 ideas, feeds them into Atlas for a weekend run, and returns the following week to review the output. He said that process can increase one researcher’s output by 100x or 1,000x, and in many cases the model returns work that is already close to a finished result, leaving the human researcher to validate it.
Wiz’s blog listed Atlas, Gemini 4 Argon, and GPT-5.6 Sol among the tools involved, and said one researcher completed in a week what previously would have taken a world-class team several months.
PHP2Shell carries a 9.2 CVSS score
The flaw discussed by Schwartz was PHP2Shell, which he described as the issue that shook the industry last week. It has a CVSS score of 9.2. An attacker does not need a username or password and may be able to execute code remotely on a server. Wiz also said in its official blog that every PHP version released over the past decade was affected by at least one of the vulnerabilities involved.
By Wiz’s rough estimate, PHP powers about 70% of websites worldwide. That includes WordPress, Drupal, and MediaWiki, the software used by Wikipedia.
Why it surfaced now
Schwartz said the relevant area in PHP had long been viewed as suspicious by the PHP team. Information related to it had appeared as early as 2020, and possibly earlier, but nobody had produced an exploit and nobody had reported a version that could be triggered remotely in a stable way.
He said AI changed that. Researchers can now spend large amounts of tokens, switch across different ideas, and run broad experiments on work that used to be too labor-intensive. In his view, that is why areas that many people vaguely considered sensitive are now being checked one by one.
Disclosure pressure and patching delays
After information about the flaw leaked, Schwartz said the parties involved in coordinated disclosure worried that once others knew the general area, they could use AI to find similar vulnerabilities. That concern led to an earlier release, and some downstream projects did not have enough time to ship patches.
He described coordinated disclosure as flawed by nature. In his account, defenders need advance notice to prepare, but that also means widening the circle of people who know. That inner circle can grow to hundreds of people, so, as he put it, he does not blame anyone for the leak.
Most workloads remain unpatched
Schwartz said Wiz monitors customer environments and the broader internet every day, and that most workloads still have not been patched. He expects the long tail of unpatched systems to persist because patching a live website often requires finding the responsible operator first and then confirming that the new version has actually been installed.
For smaller websites, he said large platforms such as managed WordPress hosting, Wix, and GoDaddy are generally aware of the issue and can patch in the background or notify customers. The bigger risk lies with small businesses that set up WordPress on their own and did not rely on a major platform. If users are unsure, he said they should ask their provider or contact the information site Wiz set up at php2shell.com.
That site says the flaw is in PHP itself, meaning a website can still be affected even if its application code is secure. The only complete fix is to upgrade PHP and restart the service. Updating applications such as WordPress alone does not update the underlying PHP runtime. The first patched versions listed were 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27, and 8.5.12.
More critical bugs are likely
Schwartz said he expects more disclosures of major vulnerabilities in the coming weeks and months, adding that PHP2Shell will not be the only one. He said the old rhythm of seeing one “worst bug of the year” is changing.
Wiz compared PHP2Shell with Heartbleed in 2014 and Log4Shell in 2021, calling it a possible turning point for the AI era. The company’s argument is that once the time and expertise required for this kind of work fall, complexity stops being an effective barrier.
What smaller companies should do
For companies without a dedicated security team, Schwartz’s advice focused on architecture. If similar flaws arrive every month or even every week, he said, a manually scheduled patch cycle will never keep up. Companies need to rethink from first principles whether systems can go offline at any time, patch automatically, and run in environments defined as code with continuous deployment.
He added that smaller companies may actually have an advantage because large organizations are burdened by legacy systems. For startups built on trust and handling sensitive personal data, he said a security expert should ideally be a co-founder or one of the earliest employees. Otherwise, the company risks living through what he described as a weekly fire drill.
