October 28, 2026

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Wednesday! If your inbox is the scariest thing you’ve seen this week, it’s probably time to give it a good ol’ cleanup.

In today’s edition:

🌐 Tragic flaw

💸 Pay up

📸 Payoff picture

—Caroline Nihill, Brianna Monsanto, Billy Hurley

CYBERSECURITY

Is the sky falling?

Illustration showing a hacker peeking through a hole in a bunch of abstract code.

Niv Bavarsky

How do you fix a vulnerability that could undermine the whole net? Asking for a friend…

On Oct. 21, OpenAI reported that its AI had exposed a critical flaw in PHP, the open-source programming language that supports many websites and web applications. The company is framing the vulnerability as one of the “most impactful security issues in recent memory”; around the world, companies and governments are rushing to patch their websites—or take them offline altogether.

Wiz Research stressed how the exploit allows attackers to execute code on affected servers or read sensitive processing memory. According to survey company W3Techs, PHP is used by an estimated 69.3% of all websites.

Gerald Caponera, SVP of risk and threat exposure management at Dataminr, said that he and his team were made aware of the vulnerability on the afternoon of Oct. 20. According to the company’s blog post, that information leaked ahead of a “coordinated disclosure.”

There’s no need to panic, though!—CN

Sponsored By Hyland

Working alongside AI agents

We are well past wondering if people should use AI. The issue now is how you utilize it and safely scale with it.

That’s why Hyland sponsored this Harvard Business Review Analytic Services paper about the agentic enterprise. It explores how agentic AI can reshape workforce productivity and outlines a plan for moving from isolated tools to embedded intelligent systems.

It found that:

87% of respondents see potential in human-AI collaboration, but only 12% have actually embedded it.
AI agents don’t understand your workflow context—and that’s the problem most enterprises miss.
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As you explore the insights, one thing that stands out is that once foundations exist, the real edge comes from redesigning work so human experts and agentic systems collaborate together inside governed workflows.

To get the full rundown, download the paper here.

IT STRATEGY

Pay day

Kareem Osman

Similar to that must-see TV show that airs at 8 pm, it’s a prime time to be an IT employee with specialized expertise.

That’s because companies are forking out more money for those who have mastered AI and other cutting-edge skills. According to Robert Half’s 2027 Salary Guide, 65% of tech leaders say they are offering higher-than-expected salaries, partly in a bid to secure those candidates.

Kareem Osman, Robert Half VP and market director of technology talent solutions, told IT Brew the tech-hiring market is finally seeing “modest gains,” with AI helping drive salary increases. Most (92%) tech leaders are offering higher pay for relevant AI skills.

“It’s a good time. I think we’re pivoting. We see salary numbers are going up modestly, which is great,” Osman said. “We’re hoping for 2027 to kind of be the year for things to be back to normal.”

Is it an employee’s market or an employer’s market?—BM

IT STRATEGY

Hire and higher

Now Hiring sign hanging against a green graph and blue background

Francis Scialabba

There’s a lot of AI pessimism out there, but at least one analyst firm sees a bright side: the jobs outlook will improve.

“We think there’ll be more jobs in 2035 than there are today,” Eric Kutcher, senior partner and chair for North America at McKinsey, told a crowd at the consulting firm’s media day in New York on October 7.

Kutcher was referring to the consultancy’s recent report, released on September 29, which estimated:

Automation could “reduce labor demand by the equivalent of roughly 36 million jobs.”
AI value could “generate demand for more than 40 million jobs over the next decade.”

Does that mean IT jobs? Many of those future occupations, the report noted, will arise from AI workflows, in areas like model development, infrastructure, agent engineering, workflow design, governance, and human oversight.

How the role of the developer is changing.—BH

Sponsored By HeroDevs

Still running PHP 7.4? PHP2Shell lets attackers take over a PHP server without logging in. Official fixes only cover new versions, so anything on 8.1 or older is exposed. And PHP 7.4 is past end of life, so no official fix is coming. HeroDevs NES for PHP 7 is a drop-in replacement with ongoing security patches. No code changes. Learn more.

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: 60,000. That’s the number of Microsoft employees who were offered a voluntary exit offer by the tech giant as it looks to slim down its workforce. (TechRadar)

Quote: “Obviously, at this point ’26 is sold out. We always leave a certain amount for On Demand, and our inference service Bedrock or EC2, but ’27 is largely sold out. A good chunk of ’28 is sold out.”—Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, on Amazon Web Services’ capacity for the next two years (DatacenterDynamics)

Read: The deets on Anthropic’s public IPO filing. (NBC)

Safety at scale. Hyland sponsored this Harvard Business Review Analytic Services paper about the agentic enterprise to explore how agentic AI can reshape workforce productivity. Read it here to get all the insights.*

^{*A message from our sponsor.}

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Written by Caroline Nihill, Brianna Monsanto, and Billy Hurley

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☕ The 411 on the PHP flaw