Websites taken down worldwide as critical cyber-security update issued

International governments and agencies have urged websites to address two critical cyber-security flaws in a programming language which powers much of the internet.

The vulnerabilities were found within the PHP programming language, with a fix issued on Wednesday afternoon.

Multiple cyber-security agencies have urged organisations unable to apply fixes in time to consider taking their sites down, leaving bodies such as the Finnish government, Edinburgh council and the BBC to take pages offline.

The flaws were discovered by AI, with cyber-security firm Wiz saying they were the “most severe vulnerabilities ever discovered” by the tech, which is reshaping the cyber landscape.

Finland has temporarily shut down the government’s public web services, while the Netherlands’ cyber-security agency said it was taking its own website offline due to the vulnerabilities.

The US National Security Agency issued similar advice on X for organisations to take their systems offline if they were unable to update with the fix.

“These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database,” it wrote.

Meanwhile, the White House said federal agencies were working with leading AI labs to speed up a fix to the issue.

And in a post on X, Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged people to check if their publicly available websites ran on PHP.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said it was addressing the security vulnerabilities.

“We have taken down a number of other systems as a precautionary measure until they can be safely patched,” it said.

That led some people to be unable to access parts of Wikipedia on Wednesday.

Edinburgh council’s website has also become inaccessible, as well as the online homes for several BBC programmes including Doctor Who and The Traitors.

They have not confirmed a link to PHP – BBC News has approached them for comment.

‘Roughly 70%’ of internet

Other websites, including the art platform DeviantArt, have said they are “temporarily down for maintenance” without specifying the reason.

The vulnerabilities were discovered by cyber-security researchers at the firms Calif and Wiz.

Calif, along with PHP Foundation, were part of a program started by OpenAI called Patch the Planet.

Through that program, they were given access to the AI company’s advanced AI tools in order to find and fix flaws in web development language.

OpenAI said in a blog post that the discovery was “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory”. It added an internal researcher at the company had also discovered the issue around the same time as the other firms.

The flaws had gone undetected for more than a decade. By August, after a few weeks of using advanced AI tools, they were discovered.

“Frontier models were critical to making this process practical, enabling us to develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours,” Wiz said in a blog post.

It has estimated “roughly 70%” of the internet is affected, though the BBC is unable to verify that figure.

While PHP Foundation intended to release its discovery later this month along with a complete fix for the problem, usually referred to by software developers as a “patch,” details of the flaw were leaked on social media on Tuesday.

It forced PHP Foundation to rush out its announcement of the vulnerability and its huge scale.

The Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, an agency of the Dutch government, has taken down its website.

Similarly the website of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the nation’s parliament, has become inaccessible.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), as well as its counterparts in the EU and Australia have urged those who use PHP to apply the fixes.

“Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the NCSC said in a note.

Japan’s national cyber-security office and EU cyber-security officials have issued a similar warning.

‘Early attacks emerging’

“PHP is everywhere. It ​quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful ⁠lot of software that doesn’t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,” cyber-security company Huntress said.

Cyber-security expert Don Smith, from the Sophos Counter Threat Unit, told the BBC this would “likely be a priority target” for hackers.

The immediate challenge was not simply installing a patch to fix the issue, but finding and managing every instance where PHP was running, he said.

“The use of PHP is pervasive, it can sit beneath public websites, content management systems, hosting platforms and third-party products, sometimes without even being obvious to the organisation using it,” he said.

He said it was crucial that organisations looked out for signs that an attacker “might have already have gained a foothold”.

The European Union Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) said the risk scores given to the vulnerabilities “indicate the potential for unauthenticated remote code execution”.

Such a cyber-attack could potentially allow hackers to install malware and take down websites.

Dane Knecht, chief technology officer at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said he was “seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up”.

The NCSC said once organisations have installed the update, they should “continuously monitor for security updates from third-party software vendors, including for appliances and services that may bundle PHP”.

It is not yet clear which versions of the programming language are affected, but CERT-EU said it could affect all versions of it dating back to PHP 5 onwards – which launched in 2004.

The PHP Foundation has issued the update only for the latest versions however – with people using PHP 8.1 or older being urged to upgrade.

PHP was created for web development. It is used on servers to implement what you see when you visit websites.

Not all websites use it, but it nonetheless powers a large portion of the internet.