The phrase Black October captures the dark and frantic mood around this month's security disclosures: serious weaknesses in widely used software, attackers moving quickly, and people scrambling to protect systems they depend on. As of October 25, 2026, the concern is about more than a single vulnerability. It is a new era folks.
The takeaway is practical. Security needs to be front and center more than it ever has been. That applies to the person running a few virtual private servers, the business relying on a cloud provider, and the family member who just wants to use online banking safely.
The New Era
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince provided a striking example in his October 21 post about php2shell. Across Cloudflare's network, he reported thousands of exploitation attempts in the ten hours before public disclosure, tens of thousands within 45 minutes afterward, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and eventually millions.
Those are attempts, not a count of successfully compromised websites. They still show how quickly a disclosure can become an operational problem.
Cloudflare's technical explanation identifies vulnerabilities in the PHP runtime itself, with potential consequences including remote code execution, data exposure, and denial of service. Updating a WordPress plugin alone does not fix the PHP runtime underneath it. Cloudflare deployed web application firewall protections, but administrators still need to follow the PHP project's remediation guidance. The same advisory was updated on October 23 for a related upload-progress vulnerability, with a configuration-dependent limitation on WAF coverage. Keeping up means checking current advisories as well as installing the first patch.
Then came Prince's warning about another disclosure, quoting Greg Brockman's report of a remote code execution issue in a widely deployed compression library. Prince's advice was blunt: “Get used to lots of patching.” A library embedded in many downstream products also means many separate maintainers and operators have work to do.
MTS relayed Prince's warning, attributed to Reuters, that severe disclosures could make the next couple of years feel like a weekly crisis. That is a forecast. The useful response is to prepare for repeated maintenance rather than assume that one emergency update finishes the job.
Japan's VPS incident shows what is at stake
Andrew Curran highlighted the attack on GMO Internet's Japanese cloud VPS service used for foreign-exchange trading. It is a concrete example of how a hosting incident can reach into customers' accounts.
In its October 24 fourth notice, GMO confirmed unauthorized access and the removal of customer information from its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud environment. Customers had reported trades they did not authorize. GMO announced compensation for qualifying realized losses, plans to replace the affected infrastructure, and requests for government assistance.
The notice also described threats involving customers' trading accounts at more than 70 securities and FX firms. That figure should not be read as a verified count of breached brokerages.
GMO's fifth notice makes an especially useful point: changing a password may leave an existing trading session active. It asks affected customers to change credentials from a device not used for FX trading and disconnect all active sessions, involving their broker if necessary.
The lesson I take from this is about the authority we leave inside hosted systems. A VPS holding trading credentials can become a route to financial harm. These notices do not establish that AI caused the attack or that it was connected to php2shell.
Small teams feel the pressure too
Dominik Sobe described an attack on one of his companies that he attributed to AI, and the intense stress of patching and responding while on holiday. His post is a personal account, rather than a published forensic analysis of how the attacker operated.
What comes through clearly is the burden on the person responsible. For a small business, an incident can mean the founder interrupting a trip, checking systems, and trying to contain damage in real time. Security work needs a place in the normal schedule.
Pieter Levels offers a useful example of what to do
In his October 25 post, Pieter Levels described spending a day asking Claude Code to audit every website and VPS he operates. More useful than the prompt alone are the controls he described: Ubuntu unattended security upgrades with automatic reboots, Tailscale policies isolating servers from one another and from personal devices, and web services running with restricted permissions instead of root access.
He also suggested adding a regular “security week” to the working calendar. I like that idea. Building, marketing, and maintaining a service all need time. Security belongs on that list.
His earlier explanation of Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel adds another useful pattern: make administration private, route public website traffic through a controlled entry point, and close direct public access to the origin server.
For the details of his VPS setup and security practices, read Levels' full post on X.
Use AI to help review the controls
Levels' audit prompt is a useful starting point. I would make the initial task more specific:
Review this website and server configuration without changing anything. Identify exposed services, unsupported software, excessive permissions, secrets handling, network isolation, update failures, logging gaps, and backup recovery risks. Give evidence for each finding, prioritize the fixes, and propose verification and rollback steps. Do not print secrets.
Then review and test the proposed changes. An AI audit is assistance, not proof that a system is secure. Its value comes from findings that can be checked and controls that can be shown to work.
Nikesh Arora's action items for developers and operators
In his October 25 post, Nikesh Arora argues that the fragmented state of IT and security makes a single comprehensive fix unrealistic. His recommendations span immediate patching, better response infrastructure, and safer AI deployment. Adapted to the work of developers and VPS operators, they give us a useful set of action items:
- Combine direct and virtual patching. Install fixes in the affected software while using protective rules to block known exploitation paths. Review coverage across network traffic, cloud applications, the WAF, and endpoints. Check whether your security providers can deliver relevant protections quickly; coverage in one layer does not establish coverage everywhere.
- Make rapid patching a tested process. Prioritize exposed systems, check dependencies, test changes, and keep a rollback plan. Arora warns that deploying large numbers of patches at once can itself disrupt infrastructure. Virtual protections can buy time while the underlying fixes are deployed.
- Connect detection to a response. Bring logs, threat feeds, and security tools into a coordinated workflow with clear actions and owners. For larger teams, Arora recommends a modern security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) system. Establish that foundation before expecting defensive agents to detect and remediate reliably.
- Make perimeter controls consistent. Review how network, application, and endpoint defenses work together, and address gaps between them. Arora advocates modernizing and consolidating the security stack to improve consistency. For a small operator, start by documenting which control protects each exposed service and how it is maintained.
- Secure the coding harness. Review the repositories, credentials, tools, and execution permissions available to coding agents. Treat generated code as code that needs inspection and testing. Arora specifically calls for attention to the security of the environment surrounding the model.
- Validate AI deployments and monitor them independently. Define the business outcome, test the actual use case, and verify the boundaries on agent actions. Add a second set of eyes to check deployments for drift, compliance, and evidence that their controls work.
Arora also cautions against assuming that swarms of defensive agents can simply match offensive agents. His argument is that attack speed, operating costs, and today's security architectures make that assumption premature. The action is to improve the systems that support detection and response, then use agents within controls that can be verified.
For nontechnical readers, start with Matt Shumer
If you do not run servers, I recommend Matt Shumer's X article, The Internet Is Under Attack. Here's How to Protect Yourself and Your Family. It is also available on his website. The practical advice is worth sharing with family and friends who will never read a vulnerability advisory.
The actions I would emphasize from his guide are:
- Install device and browser updates through their built-in settings. Treat an unexpected message or pop-up demanding an update as suspicious.
- Use unique passwords and a password manager. A password stolen from one service should not unlock your other accounts.
- Enable two-step authentication, especially for email and banking. Your email account is particularly important because it often controls password resets.
- Verify urgent bank messages independently. Open the bank's app yourself or call the number on your card. Do not give an incoming caller your password or login code.
- Review account activity and report unfamiliar transactions promptly. Respond through the provider's established channels.
You do not need to understand PHP memory handling to take those steps. And if you operate a website, your users are relying on you to handle the server-side work they cannot do themselves.
Black October is a reason to put maintenance on the calendar: reduce exposure, restrict permissions, check updates, and practice recovery. AI can help with that work. The responsibility for making sure it happened still belongs to us.