Reuters, TOKYO and BEIJING
Companies and governments worldwide yesterday rushed 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 Web sites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while Web site 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.
A security advisory is displayed on the Web site for PHP on a computer in Guernica, Spain, yesterday.
Photo: Reuters
“It was a long day and a long night, I know for all the IT [information technology] and security folks ... I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a company event in Cologne, Germany, yesterday.
The episode underscored the importance of building digital systems that can be maintained securely, he said.
PHP developers on Wednesday released urgent fixes for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using artificial intelligence (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, cofounder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security. “So companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them.”
As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended sites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, cloud services firm Cloudflare said.
“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote on X late on Wednesday. “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”
Japanese companies including brokerage Nomura, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA and East Japan Railway yesterday said they were temporarily suspending some Internet services as part of emergency measures.
Insurer Tokio Marine Holdings said it had suspended the site of a group company.
The Japanese Ministry of Finance and Japan Meteorological Agency partially suspended online services to implement safety measures, while Japan’s National Tax Agency temporarily took down its service.
The precautionary shutdowns underscore growing concerns over cybersecurity in Japan, which recorded more cyberincidents in the first nine months of the year than in all of last year, TrendAI data showed.
French telecom Orange said it had temporarily suspended access to certain PHP-based Web sites and applications across several subsidiaries as a precaution.
South Korea yesterday raised its private-sector cybersecurity alert level and activated emergency response measures, citing concerns over an increased risk of hacking attacks.
Tencent Cloud (騰訊雲), one of China’s largest cloud-computing providers, urged clients to install updated PHP versions, but stopped short of calling for widespread Web site shutdowns.
Finland’s state IT services provider Valtori said it had continued installing PHP security patches overnight and was gradually lifting precautionary service blocks after shutting down government public Web services a day earlier.
“Restoring services can take days or even weeks, as in addition to updates, the systems need to be carefully tested,” Valtori director-general Hannu Naumanen said in a statement.
The outages were not caused by exploitation of the vulnerabilities or by a breach, Valtori said, adding that it was not aware of any active exploitation of the flaws.
The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology yesterday urged organizations and users to inspect systems immediately and upgrade to the latest secure version of PHP.
It also recommended strengthening cybersecurity monitoring and changing accounts, passwords and keys where necessary.