Article by Alis Nerses of CSCL2002
With all of the hacks occurring on the internet currently, it was only a matter of time before the Wikipedia PHP security was compromised. Recently, hackers were able to break through various layers of security protocols and steal wiki account credentials and have made a serious threat to the integrity and safety of the PHP source code. Perhaps the only good news is that no other machines in the PHP infrastructure were harmed or attacked.
With the PHP source code being under attack and possibly compromised, those who write said code have taken a very hard look at the situation. After auditing the code and looking back at previous code products from older PHP versions prior to 5.3.5, no malicious injections or backdoors had been left by the hackers. This is great news, because often after the first attack occurs, the hackers leave themselves a way to get back into the system with relative ease; something that can lead to even greater security compromises. Fortunately, this does not seem to be the case, and the compromised machine has been erased and a password change universally is being implemented to hopefully block out the hackers for good.
While PHP compromises are a scary notion, everything on the internet is subject to attack and sadly nothing is fail-proof quite yet. That being said, the amount of people that use PHP and work on its security is such that it is one of the safest open source codes to use on the market today