{"id":5598,"date":"2026-10-25T00:21:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T00:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?p=5598"},"modified":"2026-10-25T06:12:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T06:12:47","slug":"cybersecurity-governments-agencies-seek-solutions-to-critical-cybersecurity-updates-over-web-site-shutdowns-worldwide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?p=5598","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity: Governments, agencies seek solutions to critical cybersecurity updates over Web site shutdowns worldwide"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>*<strong><em><b><i>International governments and agencies worldwide urge Web sites to address two critical cybersecurity flaws in a programming language powering much of the Internet, following the recent vulnerabilities found within the &#8216;PHP programming language&#8217; with a fix issued earlier this week<\/i><\/b><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Gbenga Kayode | ConsumerConnect<\/p>\n<p>International governments and agencies have urged Web sites to address two critical cybersecurity flaws in a programming language which powers much of the Internet.<\/p>\n<p><em><i>ConsumerConnect<\/i><\/em>&nbsp;gathered cybersafety experts found vulnerabilities within the PHP programming language, with a fix issued afternoon Wednesday, October 21, 2026.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"zGk9PlwBpn\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?p=5571\">Telecoms: NCC, CBN extend phone number fraud detection systems to other sectors<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"\u201cTelecoms: NCC, CBN extend phone number fraud detection systems to other sectors\u201d \u2014 Consumer Experience Is A Top Priority\" src=\"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?p=5571&amp;embed=true#?secret=LhoB4G3Hqd#?secret=zGk9PlwBpn\" data-secret=\"zGk9PlwBpn\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Following the incident, multiple cybersecurity agencies have urged organisations across the global world that were unable to apply fixes in time to consider taking their sites down, leading bodies, such as the Finnish Government, Edinburgh Council and the BBC to take pages offline, agency report said.<\/p>\n<p>Cybersecurity experts said AI discovered the flaws with cybersecurity firm Wiz stating they were the &#8220;most severe vulnerabilities ever discovered&#8221; by the tech, which is reshaping the cyber landscape.<\/p>\n<p>The vulnerabilities were discovered by cybersecurity researchers at the firms Calif and Wiz.<\/p>\n<p>Calif, along with PHP Foundation was part of a programme started by OpenAI called Patch the Planet.<\/p>\n<p>Subsequently, Finland, report noted, had temporarily shut down the government&#8217;s public Web services, while The Netherlands&#8217; cybersecurity agency said it was taking its own Web site offline due to the said vulnerabilities during the week.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, the US National Security Agency issued similar advice on X (formerly) for organisations to take their systems offline, if they were unable to update with the fix.<\/p>\n<p>The agency reportedly wrote: &#8220;These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server&#8217;s file system or database.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The White House, in Washington, said Federal agencies were working with leading AI labs to speed up a fix to the issue, according to report.<\/p>\n<p>Likewise, Japan&#8217;s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, in a post on X, urged stakeholders and development digital consumers to check if their publicly available Web sites ran on PHP.<\/p>\n<p><strong><b>What is PHP and why did it spark a global cybersecurity scramble?<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said it was addressing the security vulnerabilities as well, report noted.<\/p>\n<p>The platform stated: &#8220;We have taken down a number of other systems as a precautionary measure until they can be safely patched.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The situation led some consumers and organisations to be unable to access parts of Wikipedia Wednesday this week.<\/p>\n<p><strong><b>Edinburgh Council, BCC affected<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Sequel to the incident, Edinburgh Council&#8217;s Web site has also become inaccessible, as well as the online homes for several BBC programmes, including Doctor Who and The Traitors.<\/p>\n<p>They have not confirmed a link to PHP &#8211; BBC News has approached them for comment, according to report.<\/p>\n<p><strong><b>&#8216;Roughly 70 percent of Internet\u2019 worldwide <\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Other Web sites, including the art platform DeviantArt, have said they are &#8220;temporarily down for maintenance&#8221; without specifying the reason.<\/p>\n<p>Calif, along with PHP Foundation was part of a programme started by OpenAI called Patch the Planet.<\/p>\n<p>Report as well indicated that through the programme, the two organisations were given access to the AI company&#8217;s advanced AI tools in order to find and fix flaws in Web development language.<\/p>\n<p>OpenAI said in a blog post that the discovery was &#8220;one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>An internal researcher at the company had also discovered the issue around the same time as the other firms, OpenAI stated.<\/p>\n<p>The flaws had gone undetected for over a decade, report said.<\/p>\n<p>By August, after a few weeks of using advanced AI tools, they were discovered.<\/p>\n<p>Wiz, in a blog post, also said: &#8220;Frontier models were critical to making this process practical, enabling us to develop and adapt working exploits across multiple applications in hours.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It has estimated &#8220;roughly 70%&#8221; of the Internet is affected, though the BBC is unable to verify that figure, report noted.<\/p>\n<p>While PHP Foundation intended to release its discovery later this month along with a complete fix for the problem, usually referred to by software developers as a &#8220;patch&#8221;, details of the flaw were leaked on social media Tuesday this week.<\/p>\n<p>It was learnt that the situation forced PHP Foundation to rush out its announcement of the vulnerability and its huge scale.<\/p>\n<p>The Netherlands&#8217; National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, an agency of the Dutch government, has taken down its Web site.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly the Web site of the Tweede Kamer, the Lower House of the Parliament in The Netherlands, has become inaccessible, according to report.<\/p>\n<p>The UK&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>The NCSC, in a note, said: &#8220;Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Japan&#8217;s national cybersecurity office and EU cybersecurity officials have issued a similar warning to organisations.<\/p>\n<p><strong><b>&#8216;Early attacks emerging&#8217;<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Cybersecurity company Huntress said: &#8220;PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful \u2060lot of software that doesn&#8217;t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cybersafety expert Don Smith, from the Sophos Counter Threat Unit, told the BBC this would &#8220;likely be a priority target&#8221; for hackers.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Smith also stated: &#8220;The use of PHP is pervasive, it can sit beneath public Web sites, content management systems (CMS), hosting platforms, and third-party products, sometimes without even being obvious to the organisation using it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>According to him, it was crucial that organisations looked out for signs that an attacker &#8220;might have already gained a foothold.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The European Union Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) said the risk scores given to the vulnerabilities &#8220;indicate the potential for unauthenticated remote code execution.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Such a cyberattack could potentially allow hackers to install malware and take down Web sites.<\/p>\n<p>Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer at Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said he was &#8220;seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The NCSC said once organisations had installed the update, they should &#8220;continuously monitor for security updates from third-party software vendors, including for appliances and services that may bundle PHP.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; which launched in 2004.<\/p>\n<p>The PHP Foundation has issued the update only for the latest versions however &#8211; with people using PHP 8.1 or older being urged to upgrade.<\/p>\n<p>PHP was created for Web development.<\/p>\n<p>It is used on servers to implement what you see when you visit Web sites.<\/p>\n<p>Not all Web sites use it, but it nonetheless powers a large portion of the Internet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>*International governments and agencies worldwide urge Web sites to address two critical cybersecurity flaws in a programming language powering much of the Internet, following the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5606,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"Photo: BBC News","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_customify_content_layout":"","_customify_sidebar":"","_customify_page_header_display":"default","_customify_disable_header":"","_customify_disable_header_top":"","_customify_disable_header_main":"","_customify_disable_header_bottom":"","_customify_disable_page_title":"","_customify_disable_content_vertical_padding":"","_customify_disable_footer_top":"","_customify_disable_footer_main":"","_customify_disable_footer_bottom":"","_customify_breadcrumb_display":"","_customify_header_transparent_display":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-highlights","category-infoeducation","category-markets"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc.png",672,365,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc-150x150.png",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc-300x163.png",300,163,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc.png",672,365,false],"large":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc.png",672,365,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc.png",672,365,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/PHP-and-WEbsite-Take-Down-cc.png",672,365,false]},"author_info":{"info":["ConsumerConnect"]},"category_info":"<a href=\"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?cat=20\" rel=\"category\">Highlights<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?cat=3\" rel=\"category\">InfoEducation<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/?cat=4\" rel=\"category\">Markets<\/a>","tag_info":"Markets","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5598"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5612,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5598\/revisions\/5612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/consumerconnectng.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}