Cloud service Cloudflare recorded millions of attempts to exploit a critical vulnerability in the popular PHP programming language immediately after its public disclosure.
Cloud service Cloudflare recorded millions of attempts to exploit a critical vulnerability in the popular PHP programming language immediately after its public disclosure.
This was announced by the company's CEO Matthew Prince in his post on X.
According to the head of Cloudflare, hackers began attacking systems even before the official announcement: "10 hours before the public announcement, thousands of exploitation attempts were recorded on our network. Within 45 minutes of the announcement, this figure increased to tens of thousands, within 2 hours it reached hundreds of thousands, and now we are talking about millions of attempts."
The discovery of the bug forced system administrators around the world to take urgent measures to protect servers. Government websites in Europe and other regions were temporarily down, Reuters writes .
The situation has dealt a significant blow to Japan's infrastructure. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi personally urged website owners to urgently check their PHP usage and prepare to install patches, while the Ministry of Finance temporarily suspended some of its web services while security measures were implemented. The financial sector also had to react: Japan's largest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), also announced a temporary restriction on some online services due to the emergency introduction of security protocols.
PHP developers have already released urgent updates that address security issues. As it turns out, these vulnerabilities went unnoticed in the programming language's code for years until they were discovered using artificial intelligence tools.
The PHP development team urges all users and system administrators to immediately update their installations to the latest versions.
Recall that both vulnerabilities received a score of 9.2 out of 10 on the CVSS 4.0 severity scale . According to the European Computer Emergency Response Team CERT-EU, they could allow attackers to remotely run malicious code on the server, even without logging in.
