More than 30 Government services are currently offline, according to a minister, and a further four partially unavailable while work takes place to address a potential cyber security flaw.
Downing Street said, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday, that no large UK public-facing critical services have been affected but added that some "limited" Government websites have gone dark while the issues are resolved.
National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) experts are working with OpenAI, whose technology was used to discover the vulnerabilities, and partners around the globe to address potential problems, a No 10 spokeswoman said.
Tech minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra told the House of Lords: “The information I have is that 32 Government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable.”
She said that “has largely resulted from precautionary measures taken to protect systems while security updates and mitigations are applied”.
The Downing Street spokeswoman told reporters: “Work has already taken place across Government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue.
Cyber-security flaws were recently identified in the popular PHP programming language used on a vast number of websites across the world
Getty
“No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out.
“But this does not mean they were hacked, and work continues to resolve any issues.”
The spokeswoman said it was not “standard practice” to provide a list of Government services that were affected.
It came after cybersecurity chiefs warned UK organisations on Wednesday that a “critical security issue” had been discovered in PHP, which is used by almost 70% of websites, according to cyber security firm Cloudflare.
Lady Lloyd said the NCSC was briefed by OpenAI on the vulnerability “last week” and “the Government acted proactively ahead of public disclosure”.
Organisations have been urged by the NCSC to update to a new, fixed version of the PHP software – or consider taking their websites offline if they cannot be upgraded immediately.
Earlier, a minister said the security of next week’s Budget has not been compromised.
Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander was asked whether the issues identified with PHP could result in major Budget leaks because the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had to take down its website.
The Office for Budget Responsibility has had to take down its site
Last year, the OBR’s budget analysis was mistakenly published online ahead of then-chancellor Rachel Reeves’s statement to the Commons, allowing for early access to market sensitive information.
Mr Alexander told Times Radio: “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.”
The PHP 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.
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.
The Wall Street Journal had 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.