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Comment by gmemstr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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