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In recent weeks, a pair of flaws in PHP, the software behind much of the web, went from secret to the thing everyone’s talking about.
What to know: The PHP team rushed out patches Oct. 21 for both, nicknamed PHP2Shell and rated critical.
Amazon had already spotted an attempt to exploit them four days earlier.
And web security firm Cloudflare saw attempts climb into the millions after the announcement.
Federal agencies, including the FBI and NSA, urged organizations to fix them fast.
Plenty of dealership websites rely on PHP, often run by outside vendors. And people tracking this say AI is shrinking the time dealers have to react.
So, we asked industry folks who speak this language what to do.
Here are three ways dealers can find their weak spots before someone else does.
Hackers are moving at machine speed, and dealer websites are in their path
PHP sounds more obscure than it is, Ben Hadley, CEO of dealer online-performance firm Auto Genius, told CDG News.
Out of sight, it can handle tasks such as loading inventory, assembling pages, and processing form submissions.
“A dealer may never see that code, but a lot of the customer experience can depend on it,” Hadley shared over text.
Ben Hadley
Auto Genius
Credit applications, Social Security numbers included, often run through systems such as Dealertrack or RouteOne. (To Hadley’s knowledge, neither has been identified as affected by the PHP flaws, but he’d still ask both companies directly.)
A basic lead form also collects names, emails, phone numbers, and trade details, which are valuable too, he said.
Not to mention: He said WordPress, which runs on PHP and powers about 40% of websites, sits underneath some major dealership website platforms.
“So you have widely used software, customer information and a collection of vendors whose systems connect in ways the dealer may not fully see,” Hadley said.
But, he noted, franchise dealers may already have some help.
“Good news for most new car franchise dealers is Shift Digital has already started reaching out to all the certified partners to understand the exposure and get an idea of the remediation needed and the ETA on completion (which is exactly the type of proactive coordination that dealers should want to see),” Hadley said.
Adam Gillrie, founder of dealer website platform Savvy Dealer and AI consulting firm BiFrost Strategies, told CDG News that AI has sped up attacks enough to “change the economics,” and that dealers should look past the website itself.
“If a dealer only patches one thing, it should be the ecosystem around the site, not the site,” Gillrie said.
Adam Gillrie
Savvy Dealer/
BiFrost Strategies
Where he sees the most exposure:
Plugins and third-party integrations on the dealership site, which are “the least-maintained code, and the most of it.”
Vendors, or anyone else with a login or data connection to the site, CRM, or DMS.
Lead forms and the data they collect. A breach there is personal information, “which makes it a legal problem, not just a technical one.”
To review: Hadley would have IT check more than just the website vendors.
“Is there an old server someone set up years ago that nobody quite remembers owning? A custom form? An internal tool that quietly keeps something important running?”
For each system, ask the person responsible whether it runs PHP, whether the current fixes or verified backports are installed, and who confirmed it, he said.
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Careful dealers are keeping AI away from live customer data
One decision dealers face is whether to let AI tools work inside the DMS and CRM.
Chris Hudson, general manager of Mark Miller Subaru in Utah, nixes that.
Instead, his store pulls data from its main vendors through data connections, known as APIs, and combines it in-house. Its AI tools then search that copy, not the DMS or CRM.
“Because we build the tools internally, we control which data paths the AI can reach,” Hudson said. “Customer data is hashed before the AI sees it, so the model works with ID numbers only…”
Chris Hudson
Mark Miller Subaru
His advice: Put a buffer between the AI and the system.
“Never connect an AI tool directly to the live DMS or CRM,” Hudson said. “Give it a separate, read-only copy of only the data it needs, with customer identifiers removed. If a tool can’t do its job under those limits, that tells you something about the tool.”
Gillrie also said to protect customer data.
“First rule: Do not let AI touch customer data,” Gillrie said. “We recommend running private-only AI, even when AI companies assure us they’re protecting data — these companies have had breaches.”
Vehicle pricing and other data without personal information is “a much smaller deal,” he said.
But when an agent works under an employee’s login, Gillrie says to beware these three things:
No clean audit trail, which means you can’t tell what the person did from what the agent did.
Scope creep, where an agent with broad access messes around with more data than it should.
Vendor term gaps: Security agreements were created for humans, meaning an AI agent may not be covered.
Hadley, meanwhile, flagged tools employees may have built themselves with Codex, Claude, Lovable, Replit, or something similar.
“Those apps may have nothing to do with PHP,” Hadley said. “I’d still want to know they exist, where they run and what data they can access.”
Put it in play:
Give each AI agent its own credentials with only the access it needs, not an employee’s login, Gillrie said.
Keep a record of everything the agent does.
Get vendor sign-off to allow automated users.
Send a note around asking whether anyone has vibe-coded a tool for the dealership, Hadley said. Asking the agent that built it, “Am I exposed to the current PHP vulnerabilities?” is a start, but “someone qualified needs to check the answer.”
Website vendors are getting put on the clock
Much of dealers’ web software is old, under-maintained, or “entirely in a vendor’s hands,” Gillrie said, and a vague question gets a vague answer.
He says to skip a general “Is my site secure?” inquiry and get specific.
He suggests asking for:
An updated list of what the site runs: content management system, theme, plugins, and versions.
Which of those have known critical fixes, and whether they’ve been applied.
A named contact and a commitment to a patch timeline.
Written assurance of their security practices.
“If the vendor can’t answer those four, that’s the tell,” Gillrie said.
Back in April, Gillrie told us dealers should get that assurance from every vendor.
Now, he’d add “a clock” on patches and a breach-notification clause, so the dealer hears about an incident on its own timeline.
His reasoning:
“Assurance with no SLA and no notification duty is just a brochure,” Gillrie said.
The uncomfortable part, he said, is that most dealers don’t know who is actually responsible for their website’s security.
It’s usually divided among the marketing vendor, the DMS provider, and whoever set the site up.
“The first security fix is a people/process fix, not a software fix — name one accountable vendor, and get it in writing,” Gillrie said.
The takeaway: Gillrie’s one thing to do this week is to get answers to those four questions from the website vendor.
“If they can produce it, the dealer knows where they stand; if they can’t, the dealer knows which vendor is the problem,” Gillrie said.
Bottom line: The window between a flaw being found and being exploited is now days or less, Gillrie said.
That leaves little time to figure things out after the next warning hits.
Hadley said the place for most dealers to start is figuring out what they run, who owns it, and whether it’s been patched.
