The NCSC Says Patch PHP Now or Take the Site Offline. Anthropic's Claude Duet Will Chase Your Invoices, but Only in the US for Now.

On 21 October the PHP project released an emergency security fix for two flaws it rates critical, known together as PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619).

PHP is the programming language behind WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento and most small business websites. Insurance Business UK cites W3Techs: around 70 per cent of websites whose server language is known run PHP.

The fixed versions are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. PHP says "updating is the only safe choice" and that no complete workaround exists.

PHP 8.1 and older no longer get updates from the PHP project. The security team published minimal source patches for 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1, but a site on those versions depends on its hosting company having applied one.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says the issue "may allow attackers to execute commands on any web server running PHP". Its advice: update to the latest PHP, apply the PHP Foundation's temporary mitigations if you cannot, and if neither is possible "consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated".

The NCSC also says to check any system you could not update for signs of compromise, and to watch for updates from other vendors, because appliances and services (phone systems, firewalls, booking tools) can carry PHP inside them.

The researchers at Calif, who found the flaws with Wiz and OpenAI, confirmed an attacker needs no login. They demonstrated full takeover of default installs of WordPress 7.1.2, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Nextcloud and WHMCS.

Help Net Security reports that Wiz said frontier AI models lowered the barrier to building the attack, and that Amazon's honeypots saw an exploitation attempt on 17 October, four days before the public fix.

Insurance Business UK reported the websites of Edinburgh and Oxford councils and the Metropolitan Police unavailable on Wednesday, and Bristol, Lambeth and Barnet councils showing errors. The outages are reported, not confirmed as caused by the flaw. As of Wednesday afternoon no successful break-in had been confirmed.

Cloudflare has firewall rules for all customers, including the free tier, but told site owners to treat them as a stopgap only.

On 21 October Anthropic released Claude Duet as a research preview. It is a separate app in which Claude acts as a proactive agent, software that carries out tasks step by step on its own and comes back when something needs you.

It runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, so your laptop or phone can be off. It checks your connected accounts every few hours and sends a morning brief of priorities.

Anthropic's own examples include chasing unpaid invoices, scheduling meetings, drafting job postings, and building sales or financial forecasts. It connects to Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, Stripe, Gusto, LinkedIn, DocuSign, HubSpot, Canva and Shopify.

Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document or deletes anything, it shows you the exact action and waits for approval. Some actions are blocked even with approval, such as trading securities or moving money between accounts. Payments use a one-time virtual card through Stripe's Link wallet, so your real card number is never shared.

Anthropic lists its limits: it may misread a thread or misjudge urgency, it is weaker at personal errands such as booking tickets, and it cannot yet show you its browser.

It is included in Pro and Max plans and uses the same usage limits as the rest of Claude. Background checks count against those limits, and larger jobs such as a financial model use more.

On 22 October Google announced that Gemini speech translation in Google Meet now covers 63 languages on web, Android and iOS.

Meet detects the language being spoken and translates it for each listener in near real time, including when a speaker switches languages mid-sentence. Each participant switches translation on for themselves from the toolbar and can list languages they already understand so those are left alone. Captions match the translated audio.

It works for every participant in the meeting, including guests from other organisations, as long as the organiser has an eligible plan. Eligible editions are Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, Frontline Plus, plus Google AI Pro and Ultra for individuals.

Meetings are capped at 90 minutes of translation on base Workspace and Google AI Pro plans. It is on by default for eligible editions, and admins can switch it off per team. Rollout to Rapid Release domains starts 22 October; Scheduled Release domains from 2 November, taking up to 15 days.

It does not work in recordings, live streams, dial-in calls or client-side encrypted meetings. Google says it does not store voice data or train on users' voices.

Also on 22 October, Google said Vault, its records and legal-hold tool for Workspace, can now export Gemini in Workspace conversations from Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet.

Exports include the prompts your staff typed, the AI's answers, generated attachments, links to referenced files and citations. Admins can filter by user, team or date range, up to 5,000 users.

It only captures conversations created while conversation history is switched on. Retention rules and litigation holds for Gemini chats are not included yet.

It is available now for Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, Frontline Standard and Plus, and Education editions.