World leaders warn against security flaw found in PHP computer programming

On Wednesday, the vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language prompted a rare public warning from the United States National Security Agency (NSA), which advised websites be taken offline if they could not immediately be updated.

“Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities,” the NSA said in a social media post.

In Germany, the digital ministry said it took some websites offline as a preventative measure. France’s interior ministry deactivated the official websites for local administrative offices.

Authorities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and the Czech Republic also said they had shut down websites to apply a security patch to close the PHP loophole. Even Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted on social media to warn about the PHP risk.

The pair of vulnerabilities, dubbed PHP2Shell, were discovered by cybersecurity experts with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Researchers at security firm Calif, working with the tech company OpenAI, reported the first flaw on August 11. Wiz, a security firm owned by another tech giant, Alphabet, reported the second vulnerability on August ⁠24.

Wiz said the findings “rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history”.

The underlying flaws had been present for decades, the firm said, but proving they were exploitable required a chain of steps “at ⁠the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve”.

AI tools allow researchers to find vulnerabilities in software by testing more attacks than they can with human programmers alone.

The PHP programming language is maintained by the nonprofit PHP Foundation, which said on Wednesday that the flaws were some of the most severe it had encountered.

The group urged anyone administering a website to update their code immediately.

Both flaws rely on accessing parts of memory without proper authorisation and exploiting that access to run malicious code. The two loopholes mean an attacker can run commands on a server running old PHP code remotely over the internet, without needing a password or account to access the site legitimately.

The PHP Foundation also warned that such security weaknesses would become easier to find with AI. It called on tech companies to mount a coordinated response to avoid major disruptions to online services.

“Tools now find bugs faster than ever, for defenders and attackers alike, and the number of reports will keep growing,” the foundation said in a statement.