Several major websites have been taken offline on Wednesday after warnings about vulnerabilities in the widely used programming language PHP.
PHP is a widely used programming language, with a security issue making a large part of the internet now more susceptible to cyberattacks.
According to notices on the affected sites, the outages were described as maintenance work, without mentioning the PHP issues.
Among the websites affected are the school platform Smartschool, several websites from media companies Roularta and DPG Media and the AZ Monica hospital in Antwerp. Websites of the Flemish government have been preemptively taken down.
Several Dutch governmental websites have been taken down, including MijnOverheid, the Dutch equivalent of Flanders’ Mijn Burgerprofiel. The sites of police union ACP, pharmacists’ umbrella organisation KNMP, public transport operator EBS and the Coastguard were also affected.
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Ethical hacker Inti De Ceukelaire told the Belgian news agency Belga that the increased risk affects websites that aren't written in PHP. He has taken his personal websites offline, a measure he says he has never taken before.
According to De Ceukelaire, 70% of the web still runs on PHP, including the popular blogging software WordPress. Even Facebook has developed its own version of PHP.
The vulnerability lies in the way PHP processes files received by a website, even if that website does not have an upload function. The problem arises as soon as the server examines the file. As a result, many standard PHP installations are vulnerable.
Ahold Delhaize, the parent company of Albert Heijn, said it did not believe a recent cyberattack in the Netherlands was linked to PHP.
“As far as we can currently tell, there is no reason to assume this,” a spokesperson said.
