Websites world wide down over critical cyber security update

Both business, large and small and government websites around the world have been taken down for critical updates.

Dozens of UK government services were taken offline.

What happened?

AI discovered flaws in PHP around 2 months ago. Internet infrastructure firms were informed and had been trying to fix the issue before the news was leaked.

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What is PHP?

It stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, an open source, back end programming language that runs on a web server.

In English please...

According to the BBC, "PHP was developed in the 90’s and designed to help serve dynamic web pages and apps. It still powers Wikipedia, online shops and WorldPress (a well-known system behind many websites.) PHP powers 70% of the worlds websites according to cyber security firm Wiz."

The BBC further added Wiz wrote a blog post about their findings, “Hackers could exploit the bug and take control of the servers and steal sensitive data”.

Then what happened?

“Millions” of malicious attempts occurred "every single minute", the head of cyber security firm Cloudflare told Sky News. Amazon Web Services also said this flaw is now "being broadly exploited in the wild".

• Sky News Tech recommends…” What it means for you: Simply visiting an affected site won't cause you any harm - but you should still continue your normal cyber security habits (such as two-factor authentication).”

  
  

The US National Security Agency issued advice on X for organisations to take their systems offline if they were unable to update with the fix.

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