Earlier, authorities said that the website was kept shut down to prevent potential cyberattack risks following the identification of two critical security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language.
TBS Report
25 October, 2026, 09:45 am
Last modified: 25 October, 2026, 09:49 am
The official website of Bangladesh Bank is expected to be back online this morning (25 October) after a three-day disruption that authorities attributed to an upgrade.
Muhammad Zakir Hasan, executive director (ICT) of the central bank, told TBS, "We took our website offline ourselves for an upgrade. Many people are assuming it was a cyberattack, but that is not the case. Many countries are strengthening their website security, and we are doing the same. Our IT team is closely monitoring the situation."
"We expect the website to be back online by Sunday morning. The outage has not disrupted any banking transaction-related services," he said.
Earlier, authorities said that the website was kept shut down to prevent potential cyberattack risks following the identification of two critical security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language.
A senior central bank official said that the shutdown is not an isolated issue affecting Bangladesh Bank alone, but rather part of a global precautionary measure.
Due to the same issue, several commercial banks utilising PHP-based websites have also temporarily suspended their online platforms.
According to AFP, attackers can exploit these PHP vulnerabilities to remotely execute unauthorised commands on servers without passwords, potentially compromising files, databases and sensitive information.
As a precaution, government institutions and digital services in France, the Netherlands and Belgium have taken similar measures, reports the news agency.
Officials from the government's Aspire to Innovate (a2i) project said around 36,500 websites under the National Portal Framework are not built on PHP and are therefore not directly affected by the vulnerability. However, authorities were auditing the underlying technologies used by other government portals.
Meanwhile, the Bangladesh e-Government Computer Incident Response Team has issued a security alert, urging relevant organisations to audit their servers to identify PHP usage and versions and immediately install the necessary security patches.