World leaders warn of security flaws found in PHP programming language

Authorities in Europe, Asia and other continents have temporarily taken some government websites offline to protect against newly discovered security vulnerabilities in a programming language used to power the vast majority of sites on the internet.

On Wednesday, vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language prompted a rare public warning from the United States National Security Agency (NSA), which advised taking websites offline if they could not be updated immediately.

“Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities,” the NSA said in a social media post.

In Germany, the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation said it took some websites offline as a preventative measure. France’s Ministry of the Interior deactivated the official websites for local administrative offices.

Authorities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland and the Czech Republic also said they had shut down websites to apply a security patch to close the PHP loophole. Even Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted on social media to warn about the PHP risk.

Cybersecurity experts discovered the pair of vulnerabilities, dubbed PHP2Shell, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Researchers at security firm Calif, working with OpenAI, reported the first flaw on August 11. Wiz, a security firm owned by tech giant Alphabet, reported the second vulnerability on August 24.

Wiz said the findings “rank among the most severe vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, and arguably in software history”.

The underlying flaws had been present for decades, the firm said, but proving they were exploitable required a chain of steps “at the edge of what human researchers could practically achieve”.

AI tools let researchers find vulnerabilities in software by testing more attacks than human programmers can alone.

Volunteers maintain the PHP programming language, and the nonprofit PHP Foundation said on Wednesday that the flaws were among the most severe it had encountered.

The group urged anyone administering a website to update their code immediately.

Both flaws rely on accessing parts of memory without proper authorisation and exploiting that access to run malicious code. The two loopholes mean an attacker can remotely run commands on a server running old PHP code over the internet, without needing a password or legitimate account access.

The PHP Foundation also warned that AI would make such security weaknesses easier to find. It called on tech companies to mount a coordinated response to avoid major disruptions to online services.

“Tools now find bugs faster than ever, for defenders and attackers alike, and the number of reports will keep growing,” the foundation said in a statement.