PHP vulnerabilities continue disrupting websites

Outages linked to critical vulnerabilities in PHP software are continuing to affect websites, including those run by Finland’s National Land Survey and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Yle reports. The Ministry of Justice’s oikeus.fi website is also unavailable.

The state’s Information and Communications Technology Centre, Valtori, shut down government online services on Wednesday because of the vulnerabilities.

PHP is a programming language used to build websites. After the vulnerabilities were discovered on Wednesday, cybersecurity centres around the world urged companies and government agencies to temporarily close their online services. A security update to fix the flaws was released on Wednesday afternoon.

The temporary shutdowns are intended to protect services from possible data breaches. Cybersecurity company Wiz estimated on Wednesday that the vulnerabilities may have affected as many as 70 per cent of websites worldwide. OpenAI described them as one of the most significant cybersecurity problems in recent times.