alt Hacker News> we have built the whole world around an IT revolution that never really reached maturity and became secure
I don't disagree, but how does this relate to this incident, in practice? We're talking about a zero-day vulnerability here. What do you think should have happened - forbid any licensed IT practitioners from deploying PHP at all? No WordPress or Wikipedia?
Stop using memory-unsafe languages for anything unless a formal proof of safety is produced, only use OSes with strong sandboxing mechanism, make sure every piece of software is being sandboxed, etc. Or even just: “make the software authors liable of criminal negligence if an exploit occurs and they cannot demonstrate that they did everything possible to avoid it”.
It would indeed have slowed down the field immensely, but we would have avoided the chaos that is ahead of us right now.
And that sounds crazy compared to the standard we're used to, but what's crazy is that if your coffee machine explodes and harm you the makers are liable, but if your coffee machine is part of a botnet that disrupts a critical infrastructure, causing the death of people, then somehow the coffee machine maker faces literally no liability for not securing their IoT crap.