Government Sites Briefly Go Dark After Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Disclosed
PHP disclosed two critical flaws and urged immediate patching as government sites in Europe and elsewhere briefly went dark.
According to a Slashdot post that cited the PHP security release, the government sites went dark as a result of the disclosure. The post said operators took the sites offline while they worked to protect their systems; it did not name the affected government sites.
The Independent reported that Dane Knecht, chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare, said attacks were already emerging and that Cloudflare was updating firewall rules as a stopgap measure. “We 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,” Knecht said on X, according to The Independent.
Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP 5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable. The PHP project published an official announcement and guidance on what operators should do next, according to Slashdot.
Le Monde published a headline saying, “Websites worldwide go dark as AI exposes security flaws,” on the same day. The text available from Le Monde was a load-error message that said a required part of the site could not load because of a browser extension, network issues or browser settings; no article details were available. The headline attributed the outages to AI exposing security flaws, but the available material did not explain whether it described the same shutdowns or a different cause.