Government institutions in a number of European countries, as well as in the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, have begun temporarily taking their websites offline after the discovery of 2 critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language. They could allow hackers to gain unauthorized access to servers. The Moscow Times reports, UNN writes.
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In the Netherlands, the websites of the National Cyber Security Centre, the Port of Rotterdam, the government portal Overheid.nl, the football association, the 5 largest political parties and a number of hospitals were taken offline for security reasons.
In Finland, the state IT provider Valtori suspended the operation of public online services of government agencies. Similar measures were taken by France’s Ministry of the Interior, Belgium’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Danish municipal IT company Kombit.
Experts warned of a critical threat to millions of websites
PHP developers announced that they were preparing updates to address 2 dangerous vulnerabilities. Each of them received a score of 9.2 on the CVSS scale, indicating a critical level of threat.
According to CERT-EU, these vulnerabilities could allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on servers without authorization.
PHP is widely used by the popular platforms WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento, so the potential threat affects a large number of web resources worldwide.
Experts recommend that website administrators urgently install the updates once they are released. If this is not possible, European cybersecurity authorities advise temporarily taking vulnerable resources offline to prevent possible attacks.