South African president’s website taken offline over global cyber incident — Daily Maverick
The administration of the president of the Republic of South Africa temporarily took its website offline on October 23 due to a “global cyber incident.” In a post on X, the authorities said this was a precautionary measure and apologized for the inconvenience. Several hours after the statement, the resource remained unavailable, Daily Maverick reports.
Critical PHP vulnerabilities
The South African administration’s statement came amid international warnings about security issues in PHP, a programming language used by websites and web applications. The U.S. FBI’s cyber division reported two critical vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. According to the bureau’s assessment, they could allow attackers to remotely execute code in the PHP core and potentially compromise sensitive data and networks.
The FBI urged organizations to monitor suspicious activity on web servers, including cases in which PHP processes unexpectedly launch command shells or download files. The agency also advised implementing process monitoring to detect possible attempts to exploit these vulnerabilities.
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Warnings for websites and government institutions
According to W3Techs data cited by Reuters, PHP is used by nearly 70% of websites whose programming language can be identified. It is also the foundation of WordPress, software that powers about 40% of websites, including blogs, online stores, media outlets, and government portals.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that the issue could cause memory exhaustion and memory corruption and, under certain conditions, allow remote code execution without authentication. The center said the vulnerability had already been fixed. In Ghana, cybersecurity authorities also urged government institutions, website owners, businesses, and hosting providers to take action, as exploitation of the issue could allow control of affected servers without a login and password.
