FACTBOX-Governments, companies take websites offline over PHP flaws

Several government, school ​and hospital websites across Europe and beyond 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 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.

ORANGE SA The French telecoms group temporarily suspended access to a number of websites and applications using the PHP programming language as a precaution. The measure affects websites, services and applications across several subsidiaries and entities.

JAPAN Japan's ⁠Ministry of Finance and Meteorological Agency partially suspended online services to implement safety measures, while Japan's National Tax Agency temporarily took down its service.

Several Japanese companies, including brokerage Nomura , lender ⁠Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA and East ⁠Japan Railway said on Thursday they were also temporarily suspending some internet services as part of emergency measures. UNITED KINGDOM

The British public service broadcaster BBC said it had taken down its web portal on Wednesday. The broadcaster also reported several municipalities taking down their web services, including the ‌city of Edinburgh.