Part of the global Internet shut down after discovery of “critical” flaws in PHP computer language

This is a major and exceptional incident which affects part of the global Internet. After the developers of the PHP programming language, used in the architecture of many sites, reported a “critical vulnerability” exposing them to the risk of cyberattacks, several European government sites were taken offline this Wednesday as a security measure.

On the DownDetector site, which lists difficulties accessing different websites, reports concerning public French government sites exploded after three hours. “At the request of ANSSI, the Ministry of the Interior carried out preventive maintenance on all of its websites exposed to a critical security vulnerability,” indicated the Ministry of the Interior. “The teams are mobilized to carry out update operations as quickly as possible, as soon as the patch is made available by the publisher,” continues the ministry.

Le Figaro thus noted that the tax site, that of the Police Prefecture but also the sites of certain banks (BoursoBank) and Météo France, are temporarily inaccessible.

PHP developers announced Tuesday that they had identified “two critical vulnerabilities” and urged users to “update as soon as it becomes available.” “It’s a hypercritical vulnerability, PHP is used all over the planet, we’re talking about 70% of websites around the world which are vulnerable,” underlines Guillaume Vassault-Houlière, founder of YesWeHack, one of the French cybersecurity specialists. The flaw makes it possible to execute code remotely, in other words to execute computer code on a machine or server without having to physically access it,” he continues. Once engulfed in the breach, the hacker “can take control, steal data, install malware, recover accounts associated with the hacked site,” he explains.

Attackers have already sought to exploit this flaw, according to Dane Knecht, technical director of Cloudflare, a company specializing in web and cloud security. “We are observing the emergence of the first attacks and adapting our protective measures as new vectors appear,” he wrote on X, while emphasizing that these protections were only a temporary solution.

PHP is used by many website management systems, including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento. At this stage, all versions of PHP since version 5 could be affected, without the developers having yet specified which ones are actually vulnerable. The number of sites affected and the duration of the interruption of services from French prefectures have not been specified.