PHP Exposes Severe Security Vulnerability, Government Websites in Multiple Countries Taken Offline on a Large Scale

October 21 - Due to a severe security vulnerability exposed in the widely used PHP programming language, multiple government websites in Europe and other regions were forced offline on Wednesday, with website operators taking emergency measures to protect system security. The PHP development team announced on Tuesday local time that it had discovered two severe security vulnerabilities and urged users to update immediately after the fix patches were released.

The PHP team said on Wednesday that a new version fixing the vulnerabilities had been officially released. However, because there were reports that hackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities to breach websites, government agencies in countries such as the Netherlands and Finland had preemptively shut down some websites before the patches were released. PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages on the internet, powering website platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. According to data from W3Techs, a website technology statistics agency, about 75% of websites whose programming language can be identified use PHP. About 43% of websites worldwide are powered by WordPress, covering blogs, small business websites, government portals, e-commerce platforms, and news websites. This security incident has caused large-scale disruption to websites in multiple European countries.