Low bar of entry compared to everything else back in the day. Also quite fast being written in C. The Laravel came around and it exploded in popularity. And of course you have WordPress that back in the day allowed everyone to get a site up and running. Not just blogs, due to the vast amount of plugins. I thinks those are the biggest reasons.
Comment on ‘This Is Not a Drill’: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire
pageflight@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Sounds like a reminder to (a) migrate off PHP wherever possible, and,
“The vulnerabilities can allow unauthenticated attackers to execute code on affected servers or read sensitive process memory,” Wiz writes in its research. “That memory may contain passwords, authentication tokens, API keys and certificates belonging to other requests or the server itself.”
Keep your server processes sandboxed / running as a dedicated user.
And if you don’t actually need dynamic rendering (looking at most WordPress installations), use a static site generator (Jekyll, Hugo, etc).
undefinedTruth@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Ghoelian@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
That wouldn’t have helped much, because the vulnerability was in the server’s handling of POST (I think specifically multipart) requests.
spankysalmon@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
I seriously wonder how PHP got so popular. It has never been a paragon of … anything from a serious engineer perspective.
rabidhamster@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Really because it was easier to deal with than Perl in the early days, and those were basically your choices.
kungen@feddit.nu 2 weeks ago
Because it’s easy. Just do some HTML markup and some CSS and slap some
<?phpinline. This is partially the same reason why there are so many horribly outdated versions “in production”.