Cyber-security flaws revealed in the programming language PHP could expose millions of websites to potential hacks if left unpatched. PHP powers 70% of the world's websites, and the flaws—now called "php2shell"—were inherent in the language itself, affecting many past versions.
Websites around the world were taken offline on 21 and 22 October. The UK government took some sites offline as a precaution, while the website of a Dutch cyber-security agency, Finland's government, and parts of Wikipedia were taken temporarily offline.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra claimed that 32 government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable, though no large UK public-facing critical services had been affected. Work had already taken place across government to identify and fix potential exposures to systems.
No successful attacks have been reported so far. Olly Whitehouse described the event as unprecedented and stated there are no indications of any successful breaches by hackers.
Amazon saw hackers attempt to exploit the flaws, while Matthew Prince of Cloudflare reported hundreds of thousands of attempts within two hours post announcement.
