In the UK, 32 government services had been taken offline, the cybersecurity minister, Liz Lloyd, told parliament. The website for the Traitors was one of those that was down on Thursday, while the government declined to name the affected sites, saying services were being reviewed, updated and coming back online.
Government websites were quickly taken down so the patch could be installed, with many coming back online soon afterwards. The vulnerability sparked particular concern about the ongoing vulnerability of systems used by schools, local governments and charities, which may not have dedicated cybersecurity support to execute the fix.
The flaw prompted governments and companies globally to pull their websites off the internet before they could be attacked and so they could patch the fault. The US warned that the vulnerability could allow attackers to take control of web servers, steal data and disrupt services.
Websites around the world have been hit by millions of attempts to exploit a recently discovered vulnerability in their code, according to cybersecurity companies. The problem in the PHP programming language, which underpins about 70% of the world’s websites, emerged on Wednesday.
The prime minister of Japan encouraged businesses and organisations to patch the vulnerability or shut down their sites. Cyber-actors are likely to weaponise PHP2Shell, the NSA said, adding that frontier AI models substantially reduced that barrier, turning a longstanding flaw into an exploit.