After AI found two serious flaws in the PHP web code, a financial firm's CEO says shoppers should keep a separate prepaid card so a breach cannot reach their salary account.
A financial firm CEO is urging people to stop using their everyday bank card online. Nigel Green of deVere Group says a separate prepaid card keeps a hacked shop from reaching your salary and savings. His warning follows news that AI found two serious flaws in PHP, a programming language estimated to run about 70% of websites.
Finland temporarily closed its government's public web services. The Dutch national cybersecurity agency took its own website offline as a precaution. Agencies in Britain, Japan and Australia told website operators to patch right away or go offline. The US National Security Agency warned the flaws can give attackers a direct route into a server's files and databases. The White House says federal agencies are working with leading AI labs to speed up a fix.
Green's point is that many sites hold your card details. He lists food shopping, streaming, airlines, gyms and parking apps. You cannot see how safely any of them is built. A prepaid card holds only the money you load onto it. If thieves steal the details, they get what is on the card and nothing else. They cannot reach the account your pay goes into.
His suggestion is to use one prepaid card for everything you buy online and top it up when needed. He says it takes two minutes.
Green runs a company that sells a prepaid card, the deVere Vault Prepaid Mastercard. It works online, in stores and at ATMs worldwide. The idea of a separate card is not tied to that product, but his advice does serve his business. The article does not compare prepaid cards with other protections, such as a card you can dispute charges on.
Green is upbeat overall. He says the flaws were found by AI and patched before being made public, and he expects defenses to get much stronger over the next few years. For now, he says, criminals can move faster than many websites.
The article names no shop or service that has been breached. It does not say how many sites still run the flawed code, or whether any card data has been stolen because of these two flaws. Green says attacks will likely become more frequent, but that is his expectation, not a confirmed trend.
Consider one prepaid card for online buying, loaded with only what you plan to spend, so a breached shop cannot reach your main account.
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