FACTBOX-Websites taken offline over PHP risks

Several government, school and hospital websites in Europe were taken ​offline on Wednesday as organizations rushed to protect themselves from ​two critical security flaws in PHP, a programming language ‌that ​powers a large share of the internet.

Cybersecurity agencies across the world have warned that organizations unable to apply fixes in time should consider taking affected sites offline. PHP's developers said a set ‌of new updates fixing two previously identified critical vulnerabilities was available. Here are some major websites and services taken offline or otherwise affected:

GERMANY A spokesperson for the German digital ministry said on Wednesday the federal IT service provider ITZBund had taken several websites offline due to the discovery of PHP vulnerabilities. The temporary ‌deactivation was purely preventive and no security incidents were known to have occurred, the spokesperson said.

FRANCE The Interior Ministry said it had temporarily ‌taken offline the websites of prefectures, which are local government administrative offices, while awaiting a security fix for the PHP framework they use. It said the move was a precaution pending a patch from the framework's publisher.

BELGIUM Belgium's foreign ministry said it had temporarily taken its websites offline following reports of cyberattacks exploiting the PHP vulnerabilities, although the ⁠country's cybersecurity centre ​said it had not recorded ⁠any attacks on Belgian websites.

NETHERLANDS Many organizations followed the example of the National Cyber Security Centre and preventively took their public-facing sites offline. They included the Port of Rotterdam, ⁠government site Overheid.nl, the national football association KNVB, the websites of the five largest political parties and numerous hospital websites across the country.

FINLAND State IT centre Valtori shut ​down the government's public web services on Wednesday as "a precautionary measure." Valtori said it had not identified any attempt to exploit ⁠the flaws and that the outage was not the result of a data breach.

CZECH REPUBLIC The Czech government took its website offline on Wednesday at 7 p.m. (1700 GMT) at ⁠the ​recommendation of the country's cyber watchdog to "allow for the implementation of necessary security patches."

"The measure aims to ensure the secure operation of the website. During the shutdown, the site and its content will not be accessible to the public. Services will be restored once the recommended ⁠security updates have been applied," the government office said. WIKIMEDIA

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said it was in the process of ⁠addressing security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming ⁠language. All foundation-supported systems and volunteer-run systems that use PHP are affected, the foundation said in a statement. "We have taken down a number of other systems as a precautionary measure until they can be ‌safely patched," the foundation added.