Palo Alto's Nikesh Arora says AI is forcing firms to fix old software

Nikesh Arora, who runs the security company Palo Alto Networks, said companies are being forced to fix old software they ignored for years. He said so on the podcast All-In, in an episode posted Friday.

This touches ordinary people because websites they use, from stores to banks, run on this kind of software. When a company has to take a site down to rebuild it, customers feel it. Arora also described how a fix can tip off hackers.

Arora described a customer he spoke to that morning. The company had websites running a programming tool called PHP. Newer versions could take the patch, a software fix. Older ones could not, so those sites had to come down and be rebuilt. He said AI changed how the flaw was found. It was solved by what he called persistent compute, meaning computing power left running on a problem until it cracks. At 18:52 he put it this way.

"This problem was identified a few years ago, but nobody thought it could be solved because it required too much of coordination."

Benzinga on MSN reported Saturday that Arora warned companies to assume they will get breached and to fix their technology debt. The story says AI-found PHP flaws led to precautionary website shutdowns at several companies.

Arora also said hackers study a released patch and work backward from it. Any system left unpatched then becomes an easier target. Palo Alto Networks sells security products that can block such attacks, which he pointed to as one option. He did not say how many companies were affected.

Watch the 3 minutes where he explains it.16:25