A Major Cybersecurity Issue

A hacker’s delight was taken last night, with many websites having outages due to a cybersecurity issue. Sites like Wikipedia and Amazon all reported problems with their sites, but millions were in the same boat. The UK car MOT system was down.

The problem was the scripting language PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) and vulnerabilities that allow a hacker to remotely take control of a website.

What does PHP do for us? When you visit a website and click a button, say, search, it’s probably written in PHP. These web apps are everywhere, and 70% of websites use PHP to drive their backend.

This is not isolated to UK sites but is a global problem. Government sites, along with some large industries and public websites, have been taken down. Millions of websites have been affected.

PHP is an open-source and free piece of software. Experts to novices all use PHP; it’s quite easy to understand.

Microsoft’s chief executive says he has “not seen anything like this in a long, long time”.

The vulnerabilities have probably been there for approximately 14 years, undiscovered and waiting to be exploited.

All businesses have been urged to upgrade their PHP version with the updated patch, which was available yesterday evening. Some sites are coming back online now, as their owners have used the patch.

With AI becoming part of our lives, we must realise it could be a problem. OpenAI has been used to find vulnerabilities in software and fix them. But AI is new, and how do we fully know what it does?

Website owners are also recommended to backup your site and work and to make sure they can restore it.

We must go away and make the PHP updates as soon as  possible. This is the only way to stay secure.