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ExplainerPHP2Shell: the two PHP flaws that put most of the web at riskIn October 2026 two critical memory-safety bugs in PHP itself, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, leaked before the fix was ready. They let an attacker with no account run code on servers running PHP versions going back to 5.4.ExplainerThe eMudhra key compromise: when a certificate authority’s keys could be guessedIn October 2026 a researcher showed that eight intermediate certificate authority keys belonging to India’s eMudhra were so weak they could be recovered in under a second. Browsers blocked them within hours, and eMudhra quit the global TLS certificate business.ExplainerAI and security: faster bug hunting, faster attacks and new targetsAI models now find serious flaws in core internet software, and attackers use the same tools to exploit them within hours. What October 2026’s run of disclosures shows about the risks, and what defenders can do.ExplainerYahoo closes GeoCities: how the web lost millions of home pagesYahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.ExplainerThe Storm worm: the botnet that started with a weather headlineIn January 2007 an email about deadly storms in Europe spread a Trojan that built one of the largest peer-to-peer botnets of its time.

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Google & the web

The web of the 2000s was a churn of portals, home-page builders, wikis and search engines. Some became the infrastructure we use daily; others, like GeoCities, closed and took millions of pages with them.

Timeline

  1. 1999Yahoo buys GeoCities.
  2. 2001Wikipedia is launched.
  3. 2004Google goes public and launches Gmail.
  4. 2009Yahoo closes GeoCities in the US.

Explainers