The security of next week’s Government Budget has not been compromised by a critical security flaw in a programming language used by the majority of websites, a minister has said.
It comes after cyber security chiefs warned UK organisations on Wednesday that a “critical security issue” had been discovered in the programming language PHP, used by almost 70% of websites according cybersecurity firm Cloudflare.
Mr Alexander told Times Radio on Thursday morning: “No, I’ve had no indication whatsoever that there’s any problem in terms of a breach of Budget security.
“Indeed John Healey, who I was with yesterday in Scotland, as I understand it initiated new security protocols reflecting his experience in the Ministry of Defence when he came to the Treasury as Chancellor in the summer.”
Last year, the OBR’s Budget analysis was mistakenly published online ahead of then-chancellor’s Rachel Reeves statement to the Commons, allowing for early access to market sensitive information.
Organisations have already been urged by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to update to a new, fixed version of the PHP software – or consider taking their websites offline if they cannot be upgraded immediately.
The security issue identified could allow attackers to remotely control any web servers running PHP, which underpins popular platforms such as WordPress and Magento.
Many attempts at exploiting the vulnerability were spotted within hours of it being announced, according to Amazon and Cloudfare.
In an update published on the Amazon Web Services’ security blog, the company said its threat intelligence team found the flaw was “now being broadly exploited in the wild”.
Cloudfare chief executive Matthew Prince said on Thursday the firm spotted hundreds of thousands of hacking attempts within two hours of the announcement, with millions ongoing.
In a post on X, Mr Prince said: “In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it.
“That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions now.”
PHP developers had reportedly planned a security update on Thursday, but the release was brought forward after details of its work to address the vulnerabilities leaked online.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Alan Woodward, a visiting computer science professor at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS), said: “The cat was let out of the bag rather earlier than it was supposed to have been.
“There was an embargo on this, and there’s always a window between the flaw being publicly known about and it being patched so that the attackers can’t successfully get in.
“And what happened, unfortunately, the day before the patch was out, somebody let the cat out of the bag.
“There was an initial version of the patch that was released, and so it was very easy to compare the original with the patched version and see which bit of code you needed to go and exploit.
“And that people like Amazon, Cloudflare, all sorts of companies that monitor what’s going on on the web, saw that this was being probed for.
He added: “We don’t know whether it’s being attacked, but certainly people were probing websites to see, have you got that flaw?”
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the flaw was discovered in August by Ryan Austin, a researcher at the cybersecurity company Calif, using an advanced AI model developed by OpenAI.
Professor Woodward explained the vulnerability had in fact already been identified by human researchers in 2024, but it was then believed exploiting this security flaw would be “too complicated”, and nothing was done.
“What then happened was during this year, as the large language models became more and more effective at analysing these things, people worked out how to exploit it, and that’s what’s been happening in the last week behind the scenes,” Professor Woodward told BBC Radio 4.
“People have been scrambling away, saying, ‘Well, actually, yes, you can exploit it, and we now need to patch it’.
“And the the patch came out yesterday afternoon – luckily, the PHP Foundation issued one, so that’s why everybody’s scrambling to make sure that that’s in place.”