PHP, TLS, etc… We appear to be facing a tsunami of vulnerabilities being discovered in record time. Further, the window to act on these vulnerabilities has basically closed to zero; hackers’ tools now automatically fold the very latest vulnerabilities into their botnets within minutes/hours of discovery. I have always been extremely reluctant to expose any of my services - even with the latest and greatest security tools. My choice to stay totally within the confines of tailscale seems vindicated given this week’s news. How are you all taking this?
I only have a VPN endpoint exposed. If I need to access any of my web services I simply VPN in and away I go.
This
Tailscale is the super easy version of this. Otherwise make sure your containers don’t have root etc. block inter container networking as much as you can. Lots of relatively simple things work unless you’re actually an interesting target.
I don’t have a public facing website but I was in the process of building one for fun prior to all this.
I completely locked down. Nothing leaves tailscale pretty much. If I do need a public facing site it will be built on other peoples platforms and nothing local.
In my case, building a site would be for fun, not for anything else. AI turning it into a maintenance chore just kills any excitment that used to exist for it. If anything, I’ll probably build it on neocities at this point.
My server was recently compromised via the latest vulnerability. Fortunately, the damage wasn’t too severe. Since my server must remain publicly accessible, it can’t be hidden behind a VPN—I can only minimize its exposure as much as possible while ensuring my backup and recovery processes are rock-solid. I’ve configured the firewall to allow only essential ports, restricted SSH access to key-based authentication, enabled automatic installation of security updates, and set up daily backups, one of which is synchronized to an off-site location. Some have suggested treating public-facing machines as if they’ve already been compromised by default. I agree with this approach, and it’s exactly what I plan to do next.
not at home but i work as a software dev for a very big company you heard of and all we do noe is fix ai found security bugs. hell the stuff i work on isnt that public and we are still fixing. i can only imagine what the team of the public website are handling.
I have HTTP(s) exposed, plus a wireguard port. HTTP points at a traefik gateway running in a kubernetes environment, based on hardened talos and using cilium network policies to isolate and direct traffic. I know that I am not super safe, but given this weeks news I think the only way to be truly safe in terms of cybersecurity is to use paper notebooks, snail mail and a subscription to the local print newspaper and no digital services whatsoever. In other words: how certain can we be that tailscale, or wireguard in general, or any other securit tool isn‘t suddenly at risk? Can we live with that risk? There always was a trade-off you had to make. Unfortunately „just use lets-encrypt, fail2ban and key-auth for ssh“ isn‘t really cutting it anymore.
It certainly isn’t good to depend on it but security by obscurity is your first and probably most important line of defense. When these vulnerabilities come out they need to know your service exists to exploit it.
The best way to do that is to setup a reverse proxy to reject invalid hostnames. A single port is all you need exposed for multiple web services, and the IP scans won’t find the script kiddies anything valuable. Be careful with lets encrypt, there is a public journal of all issued certs, so make sure to get yourself a wildcard cert so that you aren’t advertising your valid hostnames to the world.
Use the reverse proxy to put basic auth in front of your services (if they can handle that). Basic auth is very simple, no web forms to attack, just a single header. If your php site is vulnerable they won’t ever be able to even attempt to reach it without a valid username/password.
I’ve got a mix of containers and VMs behind that reverse proxy. The containers have network security groups around them limiting network access. The VMs are in a Harvester hypervisor with KubeOVN for software defined networking. That means each VM is in its own subnet with network security groups around the subnet preventing any unnecessary network access.
For machines/containers that need Internet access I have a Squid proxy with an explicit whitelist of allowed URLs so that the machines can’t reach out to unauthorized sites to download their malware or contact command and control nodes.
Unattended updates for the VMs, and FluxCD keeping helm charts up to date hourly for the containers. For my own containers, weekly scheduled container rebuilds.
I do have one public website that I host for a friend (indexed by search engines so the sites name is known to the world). My friend had originally deployed that as a WordPress site, but WordPress/PHP don’t have the best security track record so I was concerned about that. The site was pretty simple so I recreated it as 100% static content, so now the attack surface is just a nginx container with a read-only filesystem.
I’m not worried. I have auto updates on and have a well hardened setup following all the good basic principles. I have had a fully public facing server for years with no issues. My php was patched and updated totally automatically a few hours after the update became available. My web server is extremely low volume traffic and there is hardly any reason for random people to be using it, so chances of somebody attempting something against it at just the right time a vulnerability has been discovered but not patched is very low chance. When a critical vulnerability appears, hackers are going to target the big fish for big wins initially, even so, it takes effort to turn a vulnerability into an actual exploit and deploy it. I could step out my front door and get run over by a bus, but I don’t worry about it and stay on doors all day to mitigate the risk.
I have had a fully public facing server for years with no issues.
To be fair, that was before AI was finding all these holes.
To be fair, my server has been public facing for the entire time these ai models have been finding vulnerabilities.
October 2026 AI is drastically better at finding these holes compared to pre 2026 AI. Do you agree?
It seems like your main point is that the threat has not elevated. But the news from this week proves that is wrong, I feel.
Ai tomorrow better than ai today? Yes, that is true any day of any year. I don’t get your point 🤷
A vulnerability was found, that vulnerability was patched. I think it’s great news that vulnerabilities are being found and fixed faster than ever. Do you agree?
Throughout 2026, IBM X-Force observed a dramatic increase in publicly disclosed vulnerabilities across major software vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle, Google Chrome and Apache. While the causes behind this increase are difficult to quantify, recent advances in AI-assisted vulnerability research demonstrate how vulnerability discovery can now occur at unprecedented scale. In August 2026, Unit 42 published a report highlighting that its autonomous vulnerability discovery platform, NOVA, identified more than 14,000 previously undiscovered vulnerabilities across nearly 4,000 open-source projects in just two months. The question is no longer whether AI can help researchers find vulnerabilities, but whether AI is changing vulnerability discovery faster than organizations are prepared to manage the risk.
Vulnerability disclosures are up 578% in 2026 across major software vendors. Publicly disclosed CVEs across Microsoft, Oracle, Google Chrome and Apache increased from approximately 1,493 disclosures during January-September 2025 to more than 10,124 during the same period in 2026, representing roughly a 578% increase. The acceleration became most apparent in Q2 2026. Vulnerability disclosure volumes remained relatively stable through the first quarter before increasing sharply beginning in April and continuing through the summer months.
https://www.ibm.com/think/x-force/ai-vulnerability-discovery
Your head’s in the sand, friend.
I have no idea what you are on about. What do you want me to do? Turn the internet off? Lock my doors and not leave the house? Sit here crying and quivering because the world is gonna end? My head is deffo not in the sand, I’m looking out the window at the rain, enjoying my life, looking forward to tomorrow.
I’m not worried about my web server any more today then I was last year. It’s a web server, it’s not me or my life, yes it how important stuff, but if the world ends it’ll be the last thing I think of.
My web server is as safe as it needs to be. Thanks for your concern.
There’s a world of possibilities between “public facing server” and “turn the internet off”. Like using a VPN or mTLS. Or only connecting when you are at home.
However it sounds like you aren’t worried about the increased threat landscape, or at least aren’t willing to compromise on your current level of convenience. That is a fair answer to OP’s question.
It’s really not the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities you need to worry about. Most of those vulnerabilities have existed for years - the recent php thing is supposedly 12 years old. Maybe someone’s been out there exploiting it for 12 years.
The people who have sought and exploited vulnerabilities since computers went online don’t disclose what they find. They are the people who should be most worried about AI-assisted vulnerability research, because it directly attacks their business model.
10000% correct! I bet the NSA or KGB has had that PHP exploit for close to a decade and they are gutted its finally been patched! There are probably an infinite number of vulnerabilities in currently running servers and clients, a few 100 will already be known and being quietly exploited. Yes, ai will find some completely unknown ones for malicious actors, but it will also find those same ones for cybersec bods, so effectively cancel each other out.
A hole for who? My understanding is that most of us were not vulnerable. Only specific setups were.
Sounds like bullshit AI hype for many of us, and real security threats for a few.
Thats exactly what all this is. If the SOTA models find a “critical” vulnerability every month or so, they get a huge shout out in the news and press globally which is some really appreciated and positive free marketing. Yes, ai has changed alot of things, some for the good some for the bad, but i dont feel like online risk has changed massively. AI finds vulnerabilities for milicious actors and cybersec bods quicker and more regularly than pre-ai, but both sides have the same tools so the same improvements, net effect is they cancel each other out. Anybody with serious about there stuff online already has sytems and processes setup to deal with patching stuff immediately. i barely touch my server for maintenance, just check stuff when im bored and make sure everything is doing what it should.
I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.
So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!
If tailscale gets compromised I’m fucked. Otherwise I won’t be opening anything else up given my limited experience.
My public facing server uses a wildcard domain cert plus it’s hosted on an uncommon higher port. It only serves static pages. My SSH port is hidden behind a WireGuard connection. I keep it extremely simple because simple is easy to maintain.
I had a public facing jellyfin. I took it down because of that.
Immich and nextcloud are still up.
I’m not saying there is a rational reasoning behind it.
I patch as soon as possible and If I were to get pwned id restore a backup and patch again. All my public facing services are sitting in a own, isolated network so an attacker wouldnt get far. If my Hypervisor got compromised id do the same. Id be very fucked if something got into my Proxmox Backup Server tho.
Eh between cloudflare blocking everything outside the US and tailscale for privileged control surfaces I’m not super worried.
Ipv6 only hosting still seems as good as an airgap😅
Recently removed the A record from a few semi-public services that got hammered by AI crawlers, works like a charm
I went the other way this week. Nothing public anymore, and the only thing open on the WAN is the WireGuard port. I lost the easy Jellyfin share links for family and gained sleep. The PHP mess made the call easy.
