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Comment by EvangelicalPig | Hacker News Reader

Most people's "PHP is inherently insecure" perception comes from projects like phpBB 2.x circa a decade ago and the shared hosts (still?) running an ancient version of PHP.

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> the shared hosts (still?) running an ancient version of PHP.

Still 80%+ of PHP sites.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ticking-php-time-bomb-martin-...

No. That w3tech link is not properly separating out the versions by age. 5.6 isn't an ancient version of PHP for example; 5.1 is.

5.6.36 was released in April 2018; 5.6 was released in 2014. 5.1 was released in 2005 by contrast.

There's nothing terribly wrong with running 5.6x if you have a good reason to do so (eg legacy), other than that the performance sucks compared to 7.2.

You can dig further into the w3tech numbers here:

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5/all

Nobody is using 5 or 5.1. The majority of all PHP installations are using more modern versions, either 5.6x or 7.x.

PHP 5.6 is reaching the end of security updates in four months and 80% of PHP sites are still running it (or lower).

https://secure.php.net/supported-versions.php

And WordPress, drupal and honestly every other php project custom or open source.

PHP needs to go away.

Careful, there are a lot of WP, Drupal, and PHP devs here, and they make up a much bigger chunk of the front end developer pool than you'd expect post-2000s.

And from sitting in on a lot of leadership meetings, they're one of the few groups that perpetually seems to be concerned with something they depend on sunsetting.

As long as they're passing with ISO, I just stay out of it.

That's fine if they are upset. Php is a scourge on the internet. If php on the server and Java on the desktop were wiped out. The internet would be a better place.

PHP is fine, no software is bug free, especially when it accepts external input. Drupal, WordPress etc are huge so there's definitely a lot of chances for things to sneak in, but PHP itself can't be 100% to blame.

They are low hanging fruit to exploit. Considering drupal specifically, and the massive history of WordPress (oh I can grab root passwords because of a massively deployed image slider) An attacker is thinking it's Christmas morning. And yes it is because they are PHP. It's unsafe under any circumstances.

Php is a go-to route of getting a shell.

It's trivial to look up what version of WordPress/Drupal/etc a site is running, and looking up that version's vulns. The issue is that sites don't keep their CMS up-to-date. Not because it's PHP. Every CMS, regardless of language, faces this issue.

It's just that some CMS is based on php and they consistently have far more vulnerabilities than non PHP ones. PHP is crap. It always has been, it will continue to be. I honestly can't imagine a building a production project from that garbage language in this day and age.

In this day and age, you'd use a framework like Laravel or CakePHP, which are a joy to work in.

And the only reason you see more vulnerabilities for CMS's written in PHP is because the most popular CMS's (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal) are all written in PHP.

We'd see the same thing happen regardless of the language (except maybe Ada or Rust. They do a good job at stopping you from shooting yourself in the foot).

As opposed to? Le JS framework-du-jour? /s

I'll take PHP spaghetti over JS any day

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