If you use the internet at all, you may have noticed that a large percentage of sites suddenly went down earlier this week—and all your nerdiest friends were talking about "The Vulnerability Apocalypse” and this thing called PHP that powers nearly 70% of the websites on the internet. You may find yourself wondering: what is PHP, what just happened, what is the vulnerability apocalypse, and what do I need to do?  

To find out what you can personally do read the first blog post in this series!  

What Is PHP?  

PHP is a programming language used mainly to create interactive websites. Facebook, Wordpress, Wikipedia, Etsy, and other major sites all use or were originally built on PHP. It is a long-established mainstay of web development. But because it is open-source, maintenance of these critical systems depends on a small number of volunteers working on this in their free time. The disaster scenario that happened this past week is the perfect example of why we need more money and people supporting open-source projects. Corporations should be contributing both. 

What Is the Vulnerability Apocalypse?  

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are the way that security professionals file reports about vulnerabilities in software. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD), run by NIST, is the official national database of CVEs. In other words, CVE reports managed by NIST are the closest thing we have to a canonical database of security vulnerabilities in software. The NVD currently has around 400,000 CVEs that have been filed and accepted since 1988. In just the month of October, 13,000 new CVEs have been submitted. This means that 3% of critical software security bugs that have ever been officially logged were found in the last month alone. And it's likely that by the end of the year over a quarter of the software vulnerabilities that have ever been found will be from 2026.  

Computer vulnerabilities reported are rising exponentially. Source: CVE Tracker

This research is being driven almost entirely by the cybersecurity capabilities of major AI models from companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Historically it has been popularly assumed by cybersecurity experts that finding unknown (zero-day) exploits in any specific project and turning them into exploits was expensive. The knowledge to discover them was not widespread, and it was a hard task even for those initiated into the arcane ways of vulnerability hunting. Google even dedicated an entire team to it.  

But now thanks to major AI models, vulnerabilities are cheap, and anyone of moderate technical skill with a few dollars and access to a frontier AI model can find vulnerabilities in a few minutes. For example, recent vulnerabilities in PHP were found with a prompt to an AI model that literally said "find bad vulnerabilities in PHP."  

What Happened This Week? 

In 2024, a potentially severe vulnerability in PHP was discovered during an external security audit. PHP’s maintainers couldn’t agree on a solution, but more importantly, they couldn’t find a way to exploit the vulnerability. Because it didn’t seem like an active threat, they ended up deprioritizing a fix in favor of working on more urgent security issues. Then, in August 2026, security researchers working with the latest models from OpenAI and Anthropic independently discovered the vulnerability again, and another one—and now, with a way to exploit them.  

We now know that the vulnerabilities were so severe that they would have allowed even moderately inventive hackers to take over any website that uses PHP and then steal customer data, launch further malware attacks, spy on users, take websites offline, or launch a massive denial of service attack.^[1] 

Because of the severity of these vulnerabilities, several of the involved researchers got together with the makers of PHP to patch the vulnerabilities and disclose them in a coordinated manner. The idea was that hopefully everyone would get a chance to quietly release and then apply fixes for the vulnerabilities before the whole world found out about it. 

But news already started to leak on October 20th. There was a post on a widely read forum “Hacker News” and other posts elsewhere. One of the researchers accidentally published a video early. Companies reported seeing active exploitation of the vulnerabilities going back as far as October 17th. On October 21st, six hours before the planned press embargo, one company, Chainguard, jumped the gun and released a patch early, essentially giving anyone instructions about exactly where to find the vulnerabilities and how to weaponize them. This sent system administrators everywhere scrambling to patch their systems before they were taken over by hackers. And it’s going to take a long time to patch all these systems. At the time of this writing over 33 million websites are still running on vulnerable versions of PHP.  

The internet is run largely on open-source software, mostly maintained by a small handful of skilled volunteers occasionally getting a small stipend, not by major corporations and highly paid engineers. These are projects you have perhaps never heard of, like PHP, OpenSSL, and SQLite, but these programs run on nearly every computer in the world and are maintained by teams as small as one person. When a vulnerability is found in these projects, it can be devastating.  

PHP isn’t the only critical open-source software with a high severity vulnerability this week either. Other widespread open-source projects like Node.js and GitLab also had severe security bugs reported.  

The small number of already overworked open-source maintainers are now facing a deluge of vulnerability reports, some of which are false, but many of which are very real. Burnout in open source has never been higher.  

We Need Stronger Support for Open Source Projects

Much of the foundation for the modern multibillion-dollar internet industry is built on open-source products that were created and still maintained—for free—by dedicated volunteers in their spare time. It’s an imperfect system, and it can lead to errors.  

One of those critical, under resourced open-source products is PHP. And while vulnerabilities in PHP were privately found years ago, they were left unfixed because they didn’t seem as impactful as other bugs at the time. These same vulnerabilities were recently rediscovered and proved to be trivially exploitable by security researchers using advanced AI models. While in the middle of the widespread, global effort to correct this mistake and deploy fixes, the problem was leaked by some of the security researchers who had gotten early access to the fixes. Unfortunately, this left millions of websites, ranging from personal blogs to government sites, vulnerable to hacking that could result in data theft, malware distribution, and worse.  

Open-source projects like PHP and others are the backbone of the entire internet. If they don’t get the resources they need, they and the internet they power, are at risk of falling apart. Corporations (whose products would not exist without these products) should be actively contributing to their maintenance. 

^{1. A technical analysis of the vulnerabilities is out of scope for this post and has already been written by the original researchers.}

It is a commonly held truth among computer geeks that there is no such thing as bug-free software, or a secure computer. Any piece of software that anyone actually uses will have a security vulnerability somewhere in the code. The more complex that software is, the more likely there will be a vulnerability. Fortunately for everyone, finding severe vulnerabilities was generally considered an expensive and difficult task requiring years of training and deep knowledge of how computers and software worked. Until recently there was a steady background hum of vulnerabilities being found and patched, with major vulnerabilities that could cripple the entire internet only happening every few years. Now that is no longer the case.  

You may have noticed your nerdiest friends freaking out about the “Vulnerability Apocalypse” this week and waving their arms in panic about something called PHP. You may have also noticed that some of your favorite websites were down for a bit. In the last two weeks of October alone, there have been multiple, potentially internet-breaking vulnerabilities reported and patched. Many of those vulnerabilities were in the open-source software that is the foundation of the vast majority of the internet.

For more detailed information on what happened, and why supporting open-source projects matters, check out our other blog.

This is all because frontier AI models, such as those created by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others, have made it incredibly cheap and easy to find previously unknown vulnerabilities (zero-days) in open- and closed-source code. Three percent of all software vulnerabilities ever found in history were found just in the month of October. This year alone researchers have found nearly a quarter of all software security issues which have ever been discovered. 

If exploiting critical software is now cheaper and easier than ever, what does that mean for us as individuals and what does that mean for society as a whole? TL; DR: It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But you can protect yourself with basic digital security hygiene that is now more important than ever.  

What Do I Need to Do? 

There absolutely needs to be a bigger conversation about how we got here and how to fix the systemic issues involved, including how corporations that depend on open-source code should contribute to their upkeep, and how big tech should be regulated.  

But for now, this news is a compelling reason to tighten up your digital hygiene. A lot of computers are going to get hacked a lot more often, and unfortunately, it isn’t going to get better any time soon. Thankfully, EFF has compiled a comprehensive set of security advice in our Surveillance Self-Defense guides. To start, we recommend making sure your browser and all applications are always up to date with the latest patches.   

You should also consider installing a tracker blocking tool, like EFF’s Privacy Badger (now on Safari), and remain vigilant for phishing attempts. Additionally, install a password manager and use unique passwords for each website, so that if one site is compromised, the rest of your passwords are safe. You should also be aware that data breaches may now be more likely, and the websites you visit may experience more attacks than usual, which means that some services may be disrupted.  

If you host a blog or other website, make sure that either you or your hosting provider has patched this particular issue.  

For additional tips on protecting yourself and others, head over to our Surveillance Self-Defense site. Additionally, if you’d like to support any of EFF’s open-source projects like Privacy Badger, Rayhunter, and Certbot, visit our donate page. 

An open internet where people can freely build, share, and remix each other's work is a powerful engine of grassroots innovation we’ve all benefited from. In recent decades, however, corporations have taken control of an increasing share of this work, giving them a greater ability to stifle challengers and limit our choices. When regulators address this by mandating that  tech giants play fair by requiring interoperability, the gatekeepers respond with a tired refrain: Playing fair puts users’ security at risk.

Unfortunately for these trillion-dollar companies, this gotcha isn’t the end of the conversation. Regulators can ensure that meaningful choice and security thrive.

Lawmakers have been catching up, recognizing that the best way to rein in big tech is to require these oligopolies to open up their platforms to independent developers. As we explained six years ago, mandating interoperability helps prevent the misuse of people’s data and enables more privacy-respecting alternatives. Tech giants, in contrast, have been arguing that our data is safer when they have exclusive control.

Tech Giants Claim Interoperability Means Insecurity

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) put interoperability into law under Article 6(7): “gatekeeper shall allow providers of services and providers of hardware, free of charge, effective interoperability with” a designated Core Platform Service they operate. The language describes an unambiguous requirement to remediate vendor lockouts and anti-competitive behavior of the major service operators—it is not optional.

Apple claimed that enforcing this obligation in mobile app stores would put their customers at risk and do irreparable harm to trust in their brand. It’s an argument reminiscent of Apple’s fight against the right to repair, and in both instances the company is fighting to maintain its restrictive ecosystem to stop people from finding better deals elsewhere. Apple has long cultivated a more corporate-controlled experience with the iPhone, but this argument is now also being used for the relatively-more-open Android devices from Google.

In the same year Apple argued against the DMA, Epic Games sued Google for its restrictive terms of service and extractive policies for revenue generated in apps. Google predictably alleged that opening up its platform to other app stores it couldn’t vet would allow harmful apps to be installed. The case was ultimately decided this year in the U.S. federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit, with the court rejecting this argument, dealing a blow to  Google’s feudal security arrangement, and paving the way for third-party app stores to be delivered as apps via the Google Play Store.

Interoperating Secure Systems Can (and Should) Exist

Policymakers cannot take tech giants’ claims at face value. Companies have every incentive to resist interoperability requirements, because interoperability lowers practical barriers and reduces switching costs for consumers adopting competing services. 

Even where companies offer credible claims from internal technical and security experts, independent experts rarely have the access and information they need to test those claims. Companies have selectively made arguments that security is harmed by interoperability, often in contexts which are to their advantage. These companies are happy to let a general misconception flourish which frames security as inherently opposed to interoperability.

This narrative is wrong. We’ve seen that when interoperability and information security are both set as essential and non-negotiable criteria, secure interoperable systems result—systems that don’t sacrifice the rich features we’ve come to expect of the services we rely on. 

The cross-platform rollout of Rich Communication Services (RCS), and now Message Layer Security (MLS) on top of it is a perfect example of this, creating end-to-end secure messaging by default between Android and iOS. For RCS and MLS, Google was conveniently on the other side of the interoperability argument, campaigning Apple to adopt the standard to overcome the diminished “green bubble” experience iPhone users had when texting non-iPhone users. Once Apple finally agreed to interoperate by implementing common standards, all users benefited from improved messaging security. In cases where legitimate security concerns are raised, these can be assessed and remedied on a case-by-case basis, without sacrificing user agency.

Striking the Right Balance

Retrofitting interoperability into already secure closed systems shouldn’t be done carelessly: it requires regulators strike the right balance of pressure and leniency to allow the time and precision necessary to make these renovations. Any components developed with the assumption of privileged access by trusted parties (e.g. your browser engine) are particularly vulnerable to serious security risks when opened up to unaccountable third parties.

By adapting interoperability and information security as essential design principles, we can expect more safety, but also more freedom.

With regard to the DMA, when security concerns are legitimate, we urge the European Commission to work with companies and outside experts to offer guidance in technical implementation and provide clarity on regulatory compliance. This approach paves a path forward that balances the interest of legal oversight and the needs of the companies alike. 

Policymakers wishing to uproot these unfair platforms of control must do so with care and limit the impact this disruption can have. But security concerns must not act as a lever to indefinitely delay compliance. Closed systems should be impartially evaluated, and if concerns are valid, regulators can allow more time and guidance to be given to companies implementing these changes. One possibility is a tiered approach: offering leniency during an initial period where systems need to be retrofitted to abide by new requirements, followed by a subsequent and ongoing stricter observance of fair play.

Once interoperability and information security are adopted as essential design principles, further development with these rights-enhancing principles in mind will more easily follow. The result will be an internet the world deserves—where we can expect more safety, but also more freedom.

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the immediate, demonstrated risks from those incidents. 

Post-incident reports show that the Hugging Face incident could have been mitigated or prevented by following longstanding cybersecurity best practices, like stronger sandboxing and monitoring. Any new legislation should focus on closing gaps in existing law to prevent AI companies from taking unreasonable risks with the public's security.

When an AI developer or deployer runs a test or a task that has a high likelihood of causing harm to third parties—for instance, by breaking into someone else's computers—there should be clear minimum safety requirements. Such tests should run in a properly sandboxed test environment, disconnected from other systems, and be monitored and logged. Following these fundamental best practices would have prevented or substantially mitigated all of the incidents at AI labs that we currently know about.

That said, any proposal must be flexible enough to evolve with changing technology. Minimum safety requirements specific only to current AI technologies are likely to become obsolete; legal standards tied to well-established cybersecurity best practices are far more likely to stand the test of time. Tying any new mandates to evidence-backed security protocols also protects the public without impeding future AI development.

Strong legislation should also mandate and fund independent third-party investigations into any serious security incidents that may occur during AI labs’ tests of new tools, and make reports of these investigations available to the public. This important transparency measure would go a long way toward providing public oversight of the industry.

As with any technology regulation, those targeting cybersecurity practices at AI labs must be careful, precise, and practical.

The term “digital sovereignty” has become ubiquitous. European officials invoke it in debates about cloud infrastructure, AI, semiconductors, and platform regulation. Governments throughout the global majority use it to argue for greater control over data and communications infrastructure and boost their economies. Companies market “sovereign cloud” products designed to reassure their customers that their information stays under local jurisdiction. But digital sovereignty could be something more: an opportunity for users around the world to build more resilient, open  systems and the skills and infrastructure to maintain them.

There is no singular definition of digital sovereignty, nor is there a single coherent position in the digital rights space. Despite its growing popularity, the term remains frustratingly vague. Policymakers, regulators, civil society groups, and others can mean very different things when they use the term. But to start simply with a broad definition, we can say that it means having the capacity to control one’s digital destiny—though the implications of that will obviously differ considerably whether you’re talking about an individual or a country.

We can start by developing  a shared understanding of what digital sovereignty actually means. We’ve also included a glossary of terms at the bottom of this post. 

In Europe and other places where digital sovereignty has become a topic of policy, discussions focus on reducing dependency: on foreign (and particularly American) cloud infrastructure, chips, platforms, and at times, foreign political priorities. The concern is both economic and geopolitical. If essential infrastructure is controlled by companies elsewhere—and thus subject to the laws of another jurisdiction—then what control does a country actually have over its own digital future?

In global majority countries in particular, wars, sanctions, and the growing fragmentation of the internet have demonstrated for many that the physical infrastructure that underlies digital life is neither neutral nor invulnerable. 

Amidst this increasing geopolitical instability governments and civil society should consider whether digital sovereignty can help shore up that infrastructure. 

What are we talking about when we talk about digital sovereignty? 

A recent Franco-German joint paper on digital sovereignty defines it as the “capability and capacity to develop, provide, use, adapt and control digital technologies including hardware in an independent, self-determined and secure manner” and puts forward a framework to operationalize Europe’s capacity to act in the digital domain. 

Some governments, such as Germany’s, have started to put funding behind sovereignty efforts through initiatives like the Sovereign Tech Agency, which “invest[s] globally in the open software components that underpin Germany's and Europe's competitiveness and ability to innovate.” 

Positions on digital sovereignty among EFF’s allies across Europe vary. Open Rights Group have defined digital sovereignty as “the ability of a country to have control over its digital infrastructure, data, and technology” and states it to be “critical for the UK’s economic and national security.” 

Similarly, the European Partnership for Democracy has expressed concern that “a few Big Tech corporations decide our collective destiny,” and argue that the EU should explore “alternative ownership models for tech companies and clearly [define] their purpose and mission.” And our friends at EDRi (of which EFF is a member) have stated clearly that “Europe’s digital sovereignty starts with open source.” Some initiatives, such as DI.DAY, consider digital sovereignty an opportunity to free users from Big Tech dependencies.

Elsewhere in the world, conversations about digital sovereignty often take a different shape. Indigenous discussions of the topic have been ongoing for more than a decade and focus on the inherent right of Native nations to govern their own digital ecosystems. In Southeast Asia, the desire for digital sovereignty has created growth in the sovereign cloud industry, but the conversation isn’t purely economic: Concerns about jurisdiction for where data is held are driving much of the conversation. 

In Latin America, digital public infrastructure is often a key aspect of debates. Across Africa, leaders speak of a desire to shift the continent from being consumers of technology to becoming architects of their own digital infrastructure and data ecosystems. And in the Middle East and North Africa, concerns about reliance on U.S. technology companies—which have engaged in conflict and disproportionate censorship (particularly of Palestinian voices) in the region—are often paramount.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher based in Jordan, recently spoke to EFF about digital sovereignty, which she sees as “the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values,” particularly in light of the role that U.S. companies have played in regional conflicts.

In a January article, Almasri pointed to growing concerns about granting greater sovereignty and influence to governments over citizens’ data, communications, and websites, writing: “This is particularly worrisome in countries that impose high levels of internet and media censorship and run unaccountable surveillance programs on their citizens’ data.”

Indeed, while pushing for greater sovereignty from Big Tech has benefits, there is an inherent risk that some states will pursue digital sovereignty as a means of cutting off or splintering access—as we’ve already seen in Iran, Russia, and elsewhere.

For that reason, it’s no surprise that some, such as Iranian professor Azadeh Akbari, believe that “the current wave pushing digital sovereignty as the key to ending dependency on American and Chinese technology is negligent of its Eurocentric bias.” 

What does EFF believe?

In a world where people have digital sovereignty, civil society should be able to communicate freely, privately, and anonymously if they wish. People should be able to easily understand where their data lives and who has access to it. That data should be easily portable between platforms and services.

At EFF, we view digital sovereignty not as a walled garden, but as an opportunity for resilience and development of industries and skills. We believe that governments can and should take a role in crafting digital sovereignty that centers the autonomy of users rather than just re-creating a state of digital dependency with a new set of companies. Governments should support and use free and open source tools and projects built using principles of interoperability and data portability. This support should include employing full-time developers, UX designers, and community managers. Government policy and legislation should grant users control of their own data and a clear understanding of who can lawfully access it. Digital sovereignty should foster users’ ability to choose how they use digital products and services, free from unfair lock-ins, coercive terms and manipulative defaults. It should also foster the broader public interest internet, the part of the web that provides public goods and useful services without requiring the scale or the business practices of the tech giants.

Encryption backdoors are fundamentally incompatible with a vision of data sovereignty that centers user control. Governments should support the development and normalization of reputable end-to-end encrypted communications as well as strong encryption for data at rest. This support should include employing cryptographers and contributing to strong, peer-reviewed encryption standards strengthened by data minimization as a fundamental design principle, as well as refraining from legislating mandates for “lawful access” or any other reason.  

As technologists, we don’t have to wait for governments to act in order to create the digital sovereignty we want. We get the internet that we build. We can contribute to open source, decentralized, and end-to-end encrypted projects. We can build standards that make interoperability and data portability a feature from the very beginning. We can resist the call of proprietary solutions, user lock-in, and encryption backdoors.

And finally, while digital sovereignty is often framed as a response to the dominance of Big Tech, that does not mean that there is no role for private companies to play. There is no point in replacing the influence of a few mostly US-based tech companies with a handful of giants based elsewhere. Companies can and should build platforms and services on top of open source, decentralized protocols and contribute to the ecosystem. Companies should also minimize processing a person’s data except as strictly necessary to provide them what they asked for, and only with opt-in consent that makes it clear to users what data they are gathering, where it is stored, and who has access to it. And companies should build their tools and platforms in a way that allows interoperability and that makes it easy for users to leave with their data. Some of these practices are already required by law in some jurisdictions, but companies don’t have to merely do the bare minimum the law demands: they should respect their users and support data sovereignty right now.

A glossary of terms

The following terms are useful for understanding this blog post as well as the broader conversation about Digital Sovereignty:

Intermediary liability: the legal responsibility of online service providers (ISPs, websites, social media platforms) for unlawful activities by their users, such as defamation, copyright infringement, or illegal hate speech.

The stack: a secure, open-source technology framework, often focusing on European alternatives, designed to break dependencies on (mostly) US-based technology providers. It comprises interoperable, vendor-neutral, and transparent digital infrastructures designed to regain control over data, infrastructure, and technology.

Digital sovereignty: the ability of people, as nations, organizations, and individuals, to control their own digital destiny by retaining authority over their own data, technology, and infrastructure.

Data sovereignty: the principle that digital information is subject to the laws and governance frameworks of the country or region where it is physically collected, stored, or processed. It dictates that data remains bound by the specific privacy protections and regulations of its originating jurisdiction, regardless of where the collecting organization is located.

Digital commons: a shared, online resource, such as knowledge, software, and data, that is collectively produced, governed, and maintained by a community, intended for public access. Examples include Wikipedia, open source operating systems such as Linux, and Creative Commons licensed content.

Data portability/interoperability: the ability to easily transfer personal data from one service provider to another, or to a personal system, in a structured, machine-readable format. It empowers users to move away from "walled gardens," reducing vendor lock-in and enhancing user autonomy.

Digital dependency: the opposite of digital sovereignty. The inability of people as nations, organizations, and individuals to control their own digital destiny through control over their own data, technology, and infrastructure. 

Decentralization: a shift away from relying on centralized, often US-based, corporate platforms toward a distributed, user-centric internet where individuals, communities, and nations maintain control over their data, digital identity, and infrastructure.

End-to-end encryption (e2ee): a secure communication process where only the sender and intended recipient can access, read, or decrypt messages or data.

Fairness (à la the Digital Fairness Act): the absence of deceptive, manipulative, or addictive design practices that distort consumer choice and exploit vulnerabilities. 

User sovereignty: the concept that individuals possess absolute control over their personal data, digital identity, and online privacy, rejecting the centralization of power by large technology platforms. It emphasizes user consent, decentralization, and the ability to manage personal data using secure and independent tools.

Governments must not adopt emerging and powerful AI technologies without also adopting strong and clear safeguards to protect Constitutional rights, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia testified today to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection. 

During the hearing on “The AI Security Landscape: How Frontier Models, Agentic AI, and AI Coding Tools Are Reshaping Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Resilience,” he explained that the use of generative AI for the purposes of mass government surveillance would supercharge unconstitutional violations of civil liberties. He also highlighted how government secrecy, in addition to the black box of for-profit proprietary technology, prevents the public and lawmakers from knowing when AI models make mistakes, including errors that seriously impact the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure and the lives of individuals.  

“AI also has a track record of getting things wrong—from false citations on legal briefs to a major AI mistake that sent DHS recruits to the field without proper training. There are likely more consequential examples that we do not even know about because of classification that would prevent a more thorough accounting," he said in his opening remarks.

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“At this level the question is not how do we rein in AI, it’s how do we rein in the agencies that would unleash AI on the American public,” Matthew said in response to a question by Subcommittee Ranking Member Delia Ramirez, D-Ill.  

You can read his full testimony as prepared here. 

Update, May 11, 2026: Utah has agreed to not enforce the VPN law until Sept. 3, 2026 after Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, challenged the law in court.

For the last couple of years, we’ve watched the same predictable cycle play out across the globe: a state (or country) passes a clunky age-verification mandate, and, without fail, Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage surges as residents scramble to maintain their privacy and anonymity. We've seen this everywhere—from states like Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Utah, to countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Indonesia. 

Instead of realizing that mass surveillance and age gates aren't exactly crowd favorites, Utah lawmakers have decided that VPNs themselves are the real issue.

On May 6, 2026, Utah will become, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates. While advocates in states like Wisconsin successfully forced the removal of similar provisions due to constitutional and technical concerns, Utah is proceeding with a mandate that threatens to significantly undermine digital privacy rights. 

What the Bill Does

Formally known as the “Online Age Verification Amendments,” Senate Bill 73 (SB 73) was signed by Governor Spencer Cox on March 19, 2026. While the majority of the bill consists of provisions related to a 2% tax on revenues from online adult content that is set to take effect in October, one of the more immediate concerns for EFF is the section regulating VPN access, which goes into effect this coming Wednesday.

The VPN Provisions

The new law explicitly addresses VPN use in Section 14, which amends Section 78B-3-1002 of existing Utah statutes in two primary ways:

1. Regulation based on physical location: Under the law, an individual is considered to be accessing a website from Utah if they are physically located there, regardless of whether they use a VPN, proxy server, or other means to disguise their geographic location.
2. Ban on sharing VPN instructions: Commercial entities that host "a substantial portion of material harmful to minors" are now prohibited from facilitating or encouraging the use of a VPN to bypass age checks. This includes providing instructions on how to use a VPN or providing the means to circumvent geofencing.

By holding companies liable for verifying the age of anyone physically in Utah, even those using a VPN, the law creates a massive "liability trap." Just like we argued in the case of the Wisconsin bill, if a website cannot reliably detect a VPN user's true location and the law requires it to do so for all users in a particular state, then the legal risk could push the site to either ban all known VPN IPs, or to mandate age verification for every visitor globally. This would subject millions of users to invasive identity checks or blocks to their VPN use, regardless of where they actually live. 

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"Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

In practice, SB 73 is different from the Wisconsin proposal in that it stops short of a total VPN ban. Instead, it discourages using VPNs by imposing the liability described above and by muzzling the websites themselves from sharing information about VPNs. This raises significant First Amendment concerns, as it prevents platforms from providing basic, truthful information about a lawful privacy tool to their users. 

Unlike previous drafts seen in other states, SB 73 doesn't explicitly ban the use of a VPN. Under a "don't ask, don't tell" style of enforcement, websites likely only have an obligation to ask for proof of age if they actually learn that a user is physically in Utah and using a VPN. If a site doesn’t know a user is in Utah, their broader obligation to police VPNs remains murky. So, while SB 73 isn’t as extreme as the discarded Wisconsin proposal, it remains a dangerous precedent.

Technical Feasibility

Then there is also the question of technical feasibility: Blocking all known VPN and proxy IP addresses is a technical whack-a-mole that likely no company can win. Providers add new IP addresses constantly, and no comprehensive blocklist exists. Complying with Utah’s requirements would require impossible technical feats.

The internet is built to, and will always, route around censorship. If Utah successfully hampers commercial VPN providers, motivated users will transition to non-commercial proxies, private tunnels through cloud services like AWS, or residential proxies that are virtually indistinguishable from standard home traffic. These workarounds will emerge within hours of the law taking effect. Meanwhile, the collateral damage will fall on businesses, journalists, and survivors of abuse who rely on commercial VPNs for essential data security.

These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors.

Uncharted Territory

Lawmakers have watched age-verification mandates fail and, instead of reconsidering the approach, have decided to wage war on privacy itself. As the Cato Institute states: 

“The point is that when an internet policy can be avoided by a relatively common technology that often provides significant privacy and security benefits, maybe the policy is the problem. Age verification regimes do plenty of damage to online speech and privacy, but attacking VPNs to try to keep them from being circumvented is doubling down on this damaging approach."

Attacks on VPNs are, at their core, attacks on the tools that enable digital privacy. Utah is setting a precedent that prioritizes government control over the fundamental architecture of a private and secure internet, and it won’t stop at the state’s borders. Regulators in countries outside the U.S. are still eyeing VPN restrictions, with the UK Children’s Commissioner calling VPNs a “loophole that needs closing” and the French Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs saying VPNs are “the next topic on my list” after the country enacted a ban on social media for kids under 15.

As this law goes into effect, we are entering uncharted territory. Lawmakers who can’t distinguish between a security tool and a "loophole" are now writing the rules for one of the most complex infrastructures on Earth. And we can assure that the result won't be a safer internet, only an increasingly less private one.

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Phishing and data breaches are a constant on the internet. The single best defense against both is to use a password manager to generate and automatically fill a unique password for every site. While 1Password has recently raised their prices, and researchers have recently published potential flaws in some implementations, using a password manager is still a critical investment in keeping yourself safe on the internet. There are free options, and even ones built into your operating system or browser. We can help you choose.

Password managers protect you from phishing by memorizing the connection between a password and a website, and, if you use the browser integration, filling each password only on the website it belongs to. They protect you from data breaches by making it feasible to use a long, random, unique password on each site. When bad actors get their hands on a data breach that includes email addresses and password data, they will typically try to crack those passwords, and then attempt to login on dozens of different websites with the email address/password combinations from the breach. If you use the same password everywhere, this can turn one site’s data breach into a personal disaster, as many of your accounts get compromised at once.

In recent years, the built-in password managers in browsers and operating systems have come a long way but still stumble on cross-platform support. Within the Apple ecosystem, you can use iCloud Keychain, with support for generating passwords, autofill in Safari, and end-to-end encrypted synchronization, so long as you don’t need access to your passwords in Google Chrome or Android (Windows is supported, though). Within the Google ecosystem, you can use Google Password Manager, which also supports password generation, autofill, and sync. Crucially, though, Google Password manager does not end-to-end encrypt credentials ​​unless you manually enable on-device encryption. Firefox and Microsoft also offer password managers. All of these platform-based options are free, and may already be on your devices. But they tend to lock you into a single-vendor world.

There are also a variety of third-party password managers, some paid, and some free, and some open source. Most of these have the advantage of letting you sync your passwords across a wide variety of devices, operating systems, and browsers. Here are four key things to look out for. First, when synchronizing between devices, your passwords should be encrypted end-to-end using a password that only you know (a “master” or “primary” password). Second, support for autofill can reduce the chance that you’ll get phished. Third, security audits performed by third parties can increase confidence that the software really does what it is designed to do. And finally, of course, random generation of unique passwords is a must.

Don’t let uncertainty or price increases dissuade you from using a password manager. There’s a good choice for everyone, and using one can make your online life a lot safer. Want more help choosing? Check out our Surveillance Self-Defense guide.

It's no secret that digital surveillance and other tech-enabled oppressions are acute dangers for liberation movement workers. The rising tides of tech-fueled authoritarianism and hyper-surveillance are universal themes across the various threat models we consider. EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense project is a vital antidote to these threats, but it's not all we do to help others address these concerns. Our team often receives questions, requests for security trainings, presentations on our research, and asks for general OPSEC (operations security, or, the process of applying digital privacy and information security strategies to a current workflow or process) advising. This year stood out for the sheer number and urgency of requests we fielded. 

Combining efforts across our Public Interest Technology and Activism teams, we consulted with an estimated 66 groups and organizations, with at least 2000 participants attending those sessions. These engagements typically look like OPSEC advising and training, usually merging aspects of threat modeling, cybersecurity 101, secure communications practices, doxxing self-defense, and more. The groups we work with are often focused on issue-spaces that are particularly embattled at the current moment, such as abortion access, advocacy for transgender rights, and climate justice. 

Our ability to offer realistic and community-focused OPSEC advice for these liberation movement workers is something we take great pride in. These groups are often under-resourced and unable to afford typical infosec consulting. Even if they could, traditional information security firms are designed to protect corporate infrastructure, not grassroots activism. Offering this assistance also allows us to stress-test the advice given in the aforementioned Surveillance Self-Defense project with real-world experience and update it when necessary. What we learn from these sessions also informs our blog posts, such as this piece on strategies for overcoming tech-enabled violence for transgender people, and this one surveying the landscape of digital threats in the abortion access movement post-Roe. 

There is still much to be done. Maintaining effective privacy and security within one's work is an ongoing process. We are grateful to be included in the OPSEC process planning for so many other human-rights defenders and activists, and we look forward to continuing this work in the coming years. 

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.