32 government services unavailable in Britain amid PHP issue — Anadolu Agency

In the United Kingdom, 32 government services are unavailable and another four are operating partially amid a cybersecurity issue related to the PHP programming language. This was reported by Anadolu Agency, citing a statement by a government official in the House of Lords.

Precautionary measures

Baroness Lloyd of Effra, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said the disruptions were largely the result of precautionary measures. They were taken to protect systems while updates were being installed and security measures implemented.

According to her, the government is working with relevant institutions to safely restore the services. The authorities began acting before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed: institutions were warned about the risk, advised to identify potentially affected systems, assess the level of impact, and prepare to implement updates and security measures.

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Notifications for businesses

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre sent 50,000 proactive notifications to business representatives and other organisations with recommendations on necessary actions. The government also said it is monitoring the situation and working with departments to maintain the security, resilience and availability of public services.

Downing Street said that major critical public services had not been affected, although some limited services may be temporarily unavailable while protection work is carried out. It stressed that the temporary shutdown of services does not mean they have been hacked.

Attempts to attack Cloudflare

The vulnerability in PHP, which is widely used for website development, prompted organisations in various countries to protect potentially affected systems. Infrastructure platform Cloudflare said it had recorded millions of attempted hacker attacks on its network, but there was no evidence that they had been successful.