Companies and governments worldwide rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the widely used PHP programming language, as a cybersecurity company reported millions of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software.
The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki showed how much public and corporate systems rely on the software, and how hard it is to fix such flaws quickly once they are made public.”It was a long day and a long night, I know for all the IT and security folks … I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft (MSFT.O), CEO Satya Nadella said at a company event in Cologne, Germany, on Thursday.
He said the episode underscored the importance of building digital systems that can be maintained securely.
PHP developers released urgent fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI, urging users to “update immediately”.
“Details of these flaws became public before fixes were ready, and attacks have since been reported,” said Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security.
“So companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That’s the whole race.
“As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare (NET.N).
“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday.
