On the AppDynamics blog there's a post from Omed Habib where he looks at the current state of security in the PHP language and makes predictions about the future of it in PHP and where the language might be heading.

In some ways security is an infinite game of chess on a board the size of the world. For every move you make, the hackers have a countermove ready. They are highly motivated to take what you have, so the game never ends; it just switches players once in awhile. In this final blog in the series, we are going to review the game board, with a look at the most recent changes to security in PHP 7 and earlier supported versions. Then, we’ll try to look a few moves ahead with predictions for the future of PHP security.

In the article he talks about PHP's popularity and how it has somewhat worked against it and its reputation when it comes to secure development. He covers PHP 7 and some of the security-related updates that came with it including:

• whitelisting classes on unserialize
• the cryptographically secure random number generator
• patches for buffer overflows and memory leaks

He ends the post looking at a possible future of the language based on comments made in this other article., suggesting that one possible place for the language to head is into the IoT (Internet of Things) space and interacting with the devices on the other end.