Canada takes some government websites offline over PHP vulnerability — Global News Canada

In Canada, several government websites, including the website of Statistics Canada, remained unavailable on the morning of October 22 after a critical vulnerability was discovered in the PHP programming language. A notice about the temporary unavailability of the resource was posted on the Statistics Canada website. Global News reports.

Protective shutdown of websites

The website of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which processes information on trademarks and copyrights, was also taken offline the previous day. Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence Evan Solomon said that some government websites were temporarily shut down to protect government systems and Canadians’ information in line with recommendations from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.

According to him, the measures are related to a vulnerability in PHP, a widely used programming language that powers about 70% of websites worldwide. The government of British Columbia also said it had taken some of its webpages offline as a precaution and was working to restore services.

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Millions of attempts to exploit the vulnerability

PHP developers released emergency fixes on October 21 and urged users to update their systems immediately. Madeleine Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity company Aikido Security, told Reuters that details of the flaws became known before the fixes were ready, and attacks had already been recorded.

According to Cloudflare, the number of attempts to exploit the issue rose sharply after information about the problem was made public. CEO Matthew Prince said that thousands of such attempts had been recorded before the public announcement, tens of thousands after 45 minutes, and later their number reached millions.

The FBI’s cyber division warned that the vulnerability could allow attackers to remotely execute code and potentially compromise sensitive data and networks. Governments in European countries and other regions also temporarily took websites offline while site operators installed security updates.