{"id":3090,"date":"2026-10-22T10:03:45","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T05:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=3090"},"modified":"2026-10-22T10:03:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T05:03:45","slug":"government-websites-go-dark-after-ai-discovered-flaw-sparks-security-scramble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=3090","title":{"rendered":"Government websites go dark after AI-discovered flaw sparks security scramble"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of \u200bcritical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes<\/a> to vulnerabilities that had been lurking \u200cin their software for years until they were uncovered using AI, saying all users were \u201cencouraged to update immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

With tech firms warning that some hackers were already exploiting the flaws, government agencies across Europe were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.<\/p>\n

Because a fix is now public and artificial intelligence tools can reverse engineer the bug with little effort, experts said they were bracing for a wave of intrusions as hackers jumped to get ahead of the updates.<\/p>\n

AI was powering a \u201crace to exploit,\u201d said Costin Raiu, co-founder of cybersecurity research and incident response firm TLP: Black. He \u200bsaid the next step was the \u201cmass compromise of every vulnerable web server on the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

PHP \u2014 a language that dates back to the early 1990s and initially stood for \u201cPersonal Home Page\u201d \u2014 underpins huge parts of the public-facing web and \u200bis baked into WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento sites, meaning any critical vulnerability potentially has enormous knock-on consequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll servers using any version of PHP released in the last 20 years will \u2060be vulnerable,\u201d said Tiffany Farriss, the interim chief executive of the Drupal Association. \u201cThis issue impacts the majority of the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity agencies around the world have urged PHP users to update immediately or take websites offline until patches can be applied.<\/p>\n

According to data from \u200bCensys, the internet intelligence firm, about 1.5 million out of 2.6 million hosts report running a version of PHP for which there is no fix.<\/p>\n

The Dutch cybersecurity agency itself went offline, saying it had done so as a precaution because of the vulnerabilities. \u200b<\/p>\n

The operator of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia also said it had taken down an unspecified number of systems until they could be safely patched. In contrast, the Internet Archive, the sprawling online library, said it also briefly went offline to deal with the issue.<\/p>\n

Even some world leaders weighed in. The Dutch prime minister said he was closely monitoring the situation. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, in a post on X, said website owners should \u201ccheck whether your live site uses PHP and prepare to apply the new fix.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>Bug found with AI<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The flaw in PHP was discovered using artificial intelligence, \u200btwo cybersecurity companies said in independent reports. Calif said in a blog post<\/a> that it found the flaws with the help of a large language model on August 1 and had been working on a fix ever since.<\/p>\n

Alphabet-owned cybersecurity company Wiz said in a \u200bblog post<\/a> that it too had discovered it with the help of Wiz Atlas, its autonomous AI vulnerability research tool, as well as Google\u2019s Gemini 4 Argon and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-5.6 Sol.<\/p>\n

The vulnerabilities remained hidden in the PHP codebase for more than a decade and would have \u200cbeen extraordinarily complicated \u2060for a human hacker to take advantage of, Wiz\u2019s post said.<\/p>\n

\u201cPre-AI, this manual work would be difficult to implement and even harder to scale,\u201d it said. \u201cWith AI, this is no longer a barrier.\u201d Calif and Wiz said they coordinated with one another and the PHP team and OpenAI on the discovery.<\/p>\n

In a statement, the White House said it was made aware of the flaw on Friday.<\/p>\n

In a blog post late on Wednesday, Amazon security chief CJ Moses said the tech giant\u2019s security team detected an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities against one of its decoy \u201choneypot\u201d systems on October 17, four days before public disclosure.<\/p>\n

The attempt on the system came from an anonymous internet address, suggesting the activity was conducted by a threat actor, Moses said, adding it was unclear how \u200bthe actor learned of the flaws while they were under \u200bembargo.<\/p>\n

More attempts followed on Wednesday by multiple actors before the \u2060embargo lifted.<\/p>\n

Amazon said it was still unclear whether any of the attempts would have worked against real websites, adding the flaws were \u201cnow being broadly exploited in the wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>Critical software<\/strong><\/h3>\n

PHP is a programming language<\/a> used to run websites. When a visitor loads a page, a server running PHP assembles the content and sends it to the browser. It is free, open-source software maintained by volunteers.<\/p>\n

Its \u200bubiquity \u2014 PHP runs roughly 75% of websites whose programming language can be identified, according to web technology tracker W3Techs \u2014 has made experts anxious.<\/p>\n

AI-assisted hacking campaigns, which have proliferated in \u200brecent weeks<\/a>, could wreak havoc on unpatched \u2060servers, said Lukasz Olejnik, a visiting senior research fellow at King\u2019s College London.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scale is huge, and with AI, exploitation may happen instantly,\u201d Olejnik said.<\/p>\n

WordPress.com<\/a> operator Automattic said users of its hosted solutions and Tumblr were safe from the bug, opens new tab<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Risks were higher for small PHP-powered websites run by individuals or organisations with limited technical resources, often on shared hosting services where customers do not directly manage the underlying servers.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Mass outages<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In the Netherlands, several organisations followed the example of the National Cyber Security Centre and took public-facing websites offline, including the Port of Rotterdam, government \u2060portal Overheid.nl<\/a>, the national \u200bsoccer association KNVB, the websites for the country\u2019s five largest political parties and several hospital websites.<\/p>\n

Danish municipal IT company Kombit said it had shut down \u200bseveral services, including the national school communication platform.<\/p>\n

Disruption was even more widespread in Finland, where state IT services provider Valtori said government public network services had been taken offline \u201cas a precautionary measure.\u201d<\/p>\n

France\u2019s Interior Ministry said it had placed all of its websites into preventive maintenance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of \u200bcritical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators around the world scrambling to protect their systems. Developers of the PHP programming language on Wednesday released urgent new fixes to vulnerabilities that had been lurking \u200cin their software for years until they were uncovered using AI, saying all users were \u201cencouraged to update immediately.\u201d With tech firms warning that some hackers were already exploiting the flaws, government agencies across Europe were among those that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english"],"gutentor_comment":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}