Websites around the world taken offline after AI finds ‘critical’ security flaw

Cyber security chiefs have warned UK organisations their websites may have to be taken offline, after a researcher using AI discovered a “critical security issue” in a programming language.

The Finnish government’s website was one of several to be partly disabled because of the incident on Wednesday, along with the websites of several local authorities in the UK.

Oxford City Council and the City of Edinburgh Council were among the organisations to take their websites offline, while pages for some BBC programmes were unavailable.

The security issue identified by the researcher could allow attackers to remotely control any web servers running the widely used programming language, PHP.

Organisations have been urged by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to update to a new, fixed version of the software.

If software cannot be immediately upgraded, organisations should consider taking their websites offline, the NCSC said.

The cyber division of the National Security Agency in the US warned weaknesses in the software could provide “a direct path to the server’s file system or database”.

The Wall Street Journal 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.

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.

OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, said in the past two months it has been leading a team of researchers working to address the critical flaw in PHP, and supported its developers as it led the fixes.

The company described the incident as “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory”, adding that while AI can help to uncover issues, it can also aid attackers.

“To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did, opening a defender’s window for maintainers and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure,” it said.