Government websites in Europe shut down over critical PHP vulnerabilities — Global News Canada

Government websites in the Netherlands, Finland and other countries temporarily ceased operating on Wednesday following reports of two critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language. PHP developers said the issues were discovered on Tuesday and urged users to update websites as soon as a fix is released, Global News Canada reports.

Precautionary website shutdowns

Amid reports that hackers are already exploiting the vulnerabilities to gain access to websites, government institutions in the Netherlands and Finland shut down their online resources as a precaution. The Dutch cybersecurity agency also temporarily took its website offline because of these risks.

PHP is used by a significant part of the internet. Huntress noted that the language powers websites on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento, shared hosting platforms, control panels and other software.

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Calls to urgently update systems

Cloudflare Chief Technology Officer Dane Knecht said the company is recording initial attacks and updating firewall rules as a temporary measure. He stressed that installing the PHP update must remain a priority.

Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom advised PHP users to update their systems immediately or shut down websites until fixes are installed. The Wordfence plugin warned WordPress website owners that automatic updates will not apply this fix, so they should determine who is responsible for updating PHP on the server. According to officials, the issue may affect all PHP versions starting from PHP 5, although developers have not yet specified the list of vulnerable versions.