It was created in the 1990s by Guido van Rossum, who was working for CWI in Amsterdam at the time. Guido was involved in the development of Python as BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life). He also worked for Dropbox as well as Microsoft.

Here are the latest updates:

• 3.7 – 3.12: gh-98739: Updated bundled libexpat to 2.5.0 to fix CVE-2022-43680 (heap use-after-free).
• 3.7 – 3.12: gh-98433: The IDNA codec decoder used on DNS hostnames by socket or asyncio related name resolution functions no longer involves a quadratic algorithm to fix CVE-2022-45061. This prevents a potential CPU denial of service if an out-of-spec excessive length hostname involving bidirectional characters were decoded. Some protocols such as urllib http 3xx redirects potentially allow for an attacker to supply such a name.
• 3.7 – 3.12: gh-100001: python -m http.server no longer allows terminal control characters sent within a garbage request to be printed to the stderr server log.
• 3.8 – 3.12: gh-87604: Avoid publishing list of active per-interpreter audit hooks via the gc module.
• 3.9 – 3.10 (already released in 3.11+ before): gh-97514: On Linux the multiprocessing module returns to using filesystem backed unix domain sockets for communication with the forkserver process instead of the Linux abstract socket namespace. Only code that chooses to use the “forkserver” start method is affected. This prevents Linux CVE-2022-42919 (potential privilege escalation) as abstract sockets have no permissions and could allow any user on the system in the same network namespace (often the whole system) to inject code into the multiprocessing forkserver process. This was a potential privilege escalation. Filesystem based socket permissions restrict this to the forkserver process user as was the default in Python 3.8 and earlier.
• 3.7 – 3.10: gh-98517: Port XKCP’s fix for the buffer overflows in SHA-3 to fix CVE-2022-37454.
• 3.7 – 3.9 (already released in 3.10+ before): gh-68966: The deprecated mailcap module now refuses to inject unsafe text (filenames, MIME types, parameters) into shell commands to address CVE-2015-20107. Instead of using such text, it will warn and act as if a match was not found (or for test commands, as if the test failed).