AI-Discovered Vulnerabilities Force Government Websites Offline in Europe

Critical security vulnerabilities discovered in the PHP programming language have forced several government agencies and organizations in Europe and other regions to temporarily take their websites offline.

October 21 (Reuters) – PHP developers released emergency security updates on October 21 to address the vulnerabilities and urged users to update their systems immediately.

According to Censys, around 1.5 million out of approximately 2.6 million servers are running PHP versions without the relevant security patches. Since PHP supports widely used platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento, the vulnerabilities pose a risk to numerous websites.

Cybersecurity firms Calif and Wiz said the vulnerabilities were discovered with the help of artificial intelligence tools. Experts emphasize that the technology is accelerating both the identification of security flaws and the development of methods to exploit them.

Due to security concerns, several government services and organizations in the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland and France temporarily took their websites offline. The operators of Wikipedia and the Internet Archive also temporarily disconnected some of their systems.

Amazon said it detected an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities on October 17, with further attempts reported on October 21. The company stated that it had not yet determined whether any of the attempts had been successful against real-world websites.

Cybersecurity experts recommend that PHP users immediately update their software, check the security of their servers and, where necessary, temporarily suspend vulnerable services.