Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators scrambling to protect their systems.
Developers โof the PHP programming language said Tuesday they had identified two critical vulnerabilities, and urged โusers to update their sites as soon as a fix was released. โ With reports that hackers were already exploiting the flaws to break into websites, government agencies in โthe Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.
PHP underpins large โparts of the internet, raising concerns that a significant number of websites could be vulnerable to attack.
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โPHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful โlot of software that doesnโt even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,โ cybersecurity company โHuntress said in a blog post.
Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare (NET.N), said โ that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its firewall rules as a stopgap measure.
โWe are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update,โ he said on X.
Wordfence, a security โplugin that protects WordPress โwebsites, said all WordPress โ sites run on a PHP-installed server. It warned that automatic updates would not apply the fix and advised site owners to find out who โis responsible for updating PHP on their sites.
Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, โAustralia, Japan and โ Britain have urged PHP users to update immediately or take websites offline until patches can be applied. The Dutch cybersecurity agency itself went offline, saying it had done so as a precaution because โ of โthe vulnerabilities.
Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP โ5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable.
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