Organisations and businesses scrambled to update their systems on Thursday after cybersecurity flaws were revealed in the widely used PHP programming language, prompting millions of hacking attempts.
Governments in Europe and the UK took websites offline as a precaution. No successful attacks have been reported so far, but experts say any impact may take months to become fully apparent (BBC).
“I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday. “It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks” (Reuters).
The researchers who discovered the bugs work at Calif, a US-based company of cybersecurity experts who test AI models to see what kind of cyberattacks they can identify and build (NYTimes).
By some estimates, about 70% of all websites and web applications use the PHP software (NYTimes).