PHP cyber-security warning sees sites taken down across Europe

The Finnish and Dutch governments have taken down websites ahead of a planned software update to a programming language which underpins many online services.

Two critical vulnerabilities with the PHP programming language, which is widely used across the internet, have been identified - a fix is being issued for them on Wednesday afternoon.

Multiple cyber-security agencies have urged organisations to rapidly adopt the updates, or consider taking their websites offline.

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

The country's 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 as soon as they become available.

"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 .

"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 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.

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.

King warns malicious online actors are evolving tactics

UK cyber chiefs say it's time to ditch passwords for passkeys - what are they?