A number of government agencies, hospitals and universities in Germany, as well as the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have temporarily taken their websites offline due to the threat of cyberattacks exploiting critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language.
According to Report, citing the German television channel n-tv, the vulnerabilities discovered allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code on servers without authorisation, gain control of websites and steal confidential data.
In Germany, the websites of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, the city of Mainz and the Charité hospital in Berlin, amongst others, have been temporarily taken offline. Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security has assessed the threat as extremely high.
The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also announced on social media platform X that it had temporarily taken its websites offline as a precautionary measure. However, Belgian cybersecurity systems have not yet detected any attacks on local websites exploiting the identified vulnerabilities.
On 21 October, the PHP developers released updates to address the issues. Experts recommend that website administrators install the patches immediately. Information about the vulnerabilities was prematurely made publicly available, which heightened concerns about potential attacks.
