Organisations which rely on the PHP programming language are being told they should install a significant software update today – or consider taking their websites offline.
Two critical vulnerabilities with PHP, which is widely used across the internet, have been identified.
The PHP Foundation, which supports it, is issuing updates which address them on Wednesday afternoon.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), as well as its counterparts in the EU and Australia have urged those who use PHP to apply the fixes as soon as they become available.
“Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated,” the NCSC said in a note, external.
EU cyber-security officials have issued a similar warning, external.
“PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful lot of software that doesn’t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,” cybersecurity company Huntress said.
The European Union Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) said the risk scores given to the vulnerabilities “indicate the potential for unauthenticated remote code execution”.
Such a cyber-attack could potentially allow hackers to install malware and take down websites.
Dane Knecht, chief technology officer at internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said he was, external “seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up”.
The NCSC said once organisations have installed the update, they should “continuously monitor for security updates from third-party software vendors, including for appliances and services that may bundle PHP”.
It is not yet clear which versions of the programming language are affected, but CERT-EU said it could affect all versions of it dating back to PHP 5 onwards – which launched in 2004.
PHP was created for web development. It is used on servers to implement what you see when you visit websites.
Not all websites use it, but it nonetheless powers a large portion of the internet.
