TOKYO/BEIJING/AMSTERDAM, Oct 22 — Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the Internet, as a cloud firm reported millions of hacking attempts after vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution on Wednesday while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software.
The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax, and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
"I have not seen anything like this in a long, long time," Microsoft chief executive officer (CEO) Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany, saying the incident showed the importance of building software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex.
"It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks," he added.
PHP key to Internet's foundations like HTML, Python
The developers of PHP — a key computing language like HTML and Python — released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using artificial intelligence, urging users to "update immediately".
Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security co-founder Madeline Lawrence said details of the flaws became public before fixes were ready, with attacks reported since.
"Companies are racing to update against attackers who can use AI to exploit them. That is the whole race," she said.
Cloud services firm Cloudflare said hacking attempts surged into the millions as companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution.
"In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it.
"That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post-announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) late on Wednesday.
Impact from Japan to Finland
On Thursday, Japanese companies including brokerage Nomura, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA, and East Japan Railway said they were temporarily suspending some Internet services as part of emergency measures.
Brewer Asahi Group Holdings temporarily suspended certain websites and systems and was conducting a security impact assessment. Insurer Tokio Marine Holdings said it had suspended its group website.
Japan's Finance Ministry and Meteorological Agency partially suspended online services to implement safety measures, while Japan's National Tax Agency temporarily took down its service.
According to data from TrendAI, the precautionary shutdowns reflect Japan's growing cybersecurity concerns, as the country recorded more cyber incidents in the first nine months of the year than in all of last year.
French telecoms group Orange said it had temporarily suspended access to certain PHP-based websites and applications across several subsidiaries as a precaution.
Tencent Cloud, one of China's largest cloud-computing providers, urged customers to install updated PHP versions but stopped short of calling for widespread website shutdowns.
Finland's state IT services provider Valtori said it had continued installing PHP security patches overnight and was gradually lifting precautionary service blocks after shutting down government public web services a day earlier.
"Restoring services can take days or even weeks, as in addition to updates, the systems need to be carefully tested," its director-general Hannu Naumanen said in a statement.
Valtori said the outages were not caused by exploitation of the vulnerabilities or by a cyber breach, and that it was not aware of any active exploitation of the flaws.
Some fixes may take weeks to implement
Several Asian governments ordered cybersecurity inspections related to the PHP vulnerabilities on Thursday.
China's Industry Ministry urged organisations and users to inspect systems and upgrade to the latest secure version of PHP. It also recommended strengthening cybersecurity monitoring and changing accounts, passwords, and keys where necessary.
South Korea raised its private-sector cybersecurity alert level and activated emergency response measures, citing concerns over an increased risk of hacking attacks.
German digital industry association Bitkom's security head Felix Kuhlenkamp said many larger operators had already carried out updates, but complex IT systems and smaller organisations could take longer.
"They may run a website using PHP but do not really keep a close eye on it. If a website is based on an old version of PHP for which there is no security update, the entire system must be updated," he said.
