[Source: Reuters]
Global firms and governments rushed to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the internet, as a cloud firm reported millions of hacking attempts after vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software.
The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
“I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday, saying the incident showed the importance of building software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex.
Article continues after advertisement
“It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks.”
The developers of PHP – a key computing language like HTML and Python – released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI, urging users to “update immediately”.
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready, with attacks reported since.
“Companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That’s the whole race,” she said.
As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare (NET.N), opens new tab.
“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday.