Companies and governments around the world scrambled Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that powers much of the internet, as cloud company report surge Later hacking attempts this The vulnerability was disclosed.
Governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline on Wednesday as a precautionary measure while website operators scrambled to ensure the security of systems running the software.
The emergency shutdown of banks, airlines, railways, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki marked one of the toughest tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep networks running, exposing the extent to which governments and companies rely on code that few understand.
“I haven’t seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on October 21. He said the incident showed the importance of building software that can be safely maintained as systems become more complex.
“I know it’s been a long day and a long night for all the IT and security folks out there.”
PHP is the key to the foundation of the Internet such as HTML and PYTHON
Developers of PHP, a computing language similar to HTML and Python, released fixes on October 20 for vulnerabilities that had been dormant in the software for years until they were discovered using artificial intelligence. they urge User “update now”.
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said details of the flaw were made public before a fix was ready, and attacks have been reported since.
“Companies are racing to update to combat attackers who can use artificial intelligence to exploit them. That’s the whole race,” she said.
Hacking attempts surged into the millions as companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, according to cloud services companies Cloudflare and Amazon.
“In the 10 hours leading up to the public announcement, we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it across the network,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted on X on Wednesday night.
“Within 45 minutes of the announcement, the number jumped to tens of thousands, within 2 hours to hundreds of thousands, and now to millions.” Amazon also said it saw widespread exploitation.
Japanese influence on Finland
Japanese companies including brokerage Nomura Securities, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, All Nippon Airways and East Japan Railway Co. said on Oct. 21 that they would temporarily suspend some internet services as part of emergency measures.
Brewer Asahi Group Holdings has temporarily closed certain websites and systems and is conducting a security impact assessment. Insurer Tokio Marine Holdings said it had suspended its group website.
Japan’s Ministry of Finance and Meteorological Agency have partially suspended online services to implement safety measures, and Japan’s National Tax Agency has also temporarily suspended its services.
The precautionary shutdowns illustrate Japan’s growing concerns about cybersecurity, as the country recorded more cyber incidents in the first nine months of this year than all of last year, according to TrendAI.
French telecom group Orange said it has temporarily stopped access to certain PHP-based websites and applications at several subsidiaries as a precautionary measure.
Tencent Cloud, one of China’s largest cloud computing providers, urged customers to install newer versions of PHP but stopped short of calling for widespread website shutdowns.
Valtori, Finland’s national IT service provider, said that after shutting down the government’s public network services a day ago, the company had continued to install PHP security patches overnight and gradually lifted the preventive service blockade.
“Restoring service may take days or even weeks as, in addition to updates, careful testing of the system is required,” Valtori Director General Hannu Naumanen said in a statement.
Valtori said the outage was not caused by an exploit of these vulnerabilities or network vulnerabilities, and that it was not aware of anyone actively exploiting these vulnerabilities.
Some fixes may take weeks to implement
On Thursday, several Asian governments ordered cybersecurity checks on PHP vulnerabilities.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology urges organizations and users to check their systems and upgrade to the latest PHP security version. It also recommends increasing network security monitoring and changing accounts, passwords and keys when necessary.
South Korea has raised its private sector cybersecurity alert level and launched emergency response measures amid concerns about an increased risk of hacker attacks.
Felix Kuhlenkamp, head of security at Bitkom, the German digital industry association, said that many large operators have already carried out the update, but for complex IT systems and small organizations, it may take longer.
“They might be using PHP to run the site but not really paying close attention to it,” he said. “If a website is based on an older version of PHP and does not have security updates, the entire system must be updated.”
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