Factbox-Websites taken offline over PHP risks

Oct 21 (Reuters) - 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.

CERT-EU, the EU's cybersecurity response team, had 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 now live and strongly encouraged users to utilize them immediately.

The Dutch government was among those that took sites offline as a precaution. Cloudflare said it was seeing early attacks emerging, while Australia's cyber agency said it was not aware of active exploitation.

Here are some major websites and services reported offline:

US NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY

The agency urged organizations using PHP to be "prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities," warning that such flaws often provide "a direct path to the server's file system or database."

In a post on X, the agency said organizations that cannot update immediately should take affected systems offline until the issue is fully mitigated, adding that it "will follow up shortly with more specific guidance."

GERMANY

A spokesperson for the German digital ministry told Reuters 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, he said.

FRANCE

The Interior Ministry said it had temporarily taken the websites of prefectures, which are local government administrative offices, offline 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.

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.

(Reporting by Anzar Mehraj and Prathik Jayaprakash in Bengaluru; editing by Arpan Varghese and)