Websites in France, the Netherlands and Belgium taken offline over PHP vulnerabilities — NDTV World

In France, the Netherlands and Belgium, government institutions temporarily took some websites offline after details of two critical vulnerabilities in PHP were leaked. NDTV World reports. According to the outlet, government bodies and companies in various countries also took websites offline on Wednesday.

Call to urgently install the fix

The U.S. National Security Agency urged organizations to immediately install updates or take vulnerable systems out of operation. The agency said such security flaws could give attackers direct access to a server’s file system or database and potentially allow them to take control of a web server without a password.

PHP is used by popular website-building platforms, so the vulnerabilities may affect online stores, media outlets and government online services. PHP volunteers released a fix on Wednesday, while the PHP Foundation urged users to update their software as soon as possible.

More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.

Precautionary website shutdowns

In France, local government websites, including the Paris Police Prefecture’s resource, became unavailable on Wednesday afternoon. France’s Interior Ministry said this happened at the request of the French national cybersecurity agency after a critical vulnerability was discovered.

In the Netherlands, the national digital identification service DigiD, the House of Representatives website and the national cybersecurity center’s resource were taken offline as a precaution, public broadcaster NOS reported. Belgium’s Foreign Ministry also temporarily took its websites offline, although the Belgian Centre for Cybersecurity recorded no attacks on the country’s websites.

PHP developers were privately informed about the vulnerabilities in August by Calif and OpenAI, which discovered them independently of each other on the same day. Wiz later reported additional ways to exploit the flaws. Details of the vulnerabilities became publicly available on Tuesday, a day before the planned release of the fix, prompting the urgent shutdown of some resources.