Government agencies and companies around the world shut down websites on Wednesday after two critical flaws came to light involving PHP, a programming language that is the basis for a large share of the internet.
PHP sits underneath popular web design platforms, so the weaknesses potentially affect a vast range of websites, from online stores and news outlets to government services.
Wiz, one of the security firms that found the issues, estimated that PHP runs about 70 per cent of the world’s websites and said the flaws rank “among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP and arguably in software history”.
The US National Security Agency told organisations to patch immediately or pull vulnerable systems offline. The flaws “often provide a direct path to the server’s file system or database”, the NSA said in a statement on social media.