Factbox-Governments, companies take websites offline over PHP flaws

Oct 22 (Reuters) - 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.

INTERNET ARCHIVE

The non-profit digital library took its portal offline on Wednesday due to emergency maintenance and security patches, it said in an X post. The website is back online.

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 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 some web portals on Wednesday. The broadcaster also reported several municipalities taking down their web services, including the city of Edinburgh. 

CANADA

The Government of Canada said in a statement that some of its websites may be temporarily unavailable or experience service disruptions, adding that there is no indication at this time that any of its systems or information holdings have been compromised. 

(Reporting by Anzar Mehraj, Prathik Jayaprakash in Bengaluru, Jason Hovet, Fabrizio La Rocca and Mirko Miorelli in Gdansk; editing by Arpan Varghese, Bill Berkrot, Matt Scuffham and Maju Samuel)