Black October 2026

Photo by Wouter Supardi Salari / UnsplashRoughly around the middle of October we started hearing the rumors that a very severe PHP vulnerability had been discovered. It was so severe the team pre-announced the release of it and one core member unofficially suggested the most secure course of action was to turn off the servers prior to the patch being released. This created quite the internal panic and we set off a schedule to jump into action the next day and upgrade every single project we had as soon as possible grouping into teams to work in parallel.The patches came out and I upgraded my assigned things between work & hobby throughout that day - everything was secure. It felt good to be on supported versions of the PHP language, because patches were available. A few times in my career I've had to fight with clients on the importance of upgrading tooling which was never fun. It was situations like that which helped reinforce the choices we made in the past were worth it. I can't…

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