Several websites are still offline on Thursday morning following the discovery of a security leak in the popular programming language PHP, as the head of cybersecurity firm Cloudflare says his company detected millions of attempted exploits.
At around 9:30 on Thursday, the websites of the Federal Public Service Finance, the city councils of Ghent and Brussels, the AZ Monica and Klina hospitals in Antwerp, and the Belgian Centre for Cybersecurity (CCB) were still down.
PHP is a widely used programming language to build and design websites, with around 70% of the internet being built with PHP. The developer of the language issued a warning on Tuesday, saying it had discovered two "critical security leaks" that could lead to hackers taking control of servers.
The vulnerability lay 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, and as a result, many standard PHP installations were vulnerable to outside attacks.
The company says it was able to discover the leaks with the help of artificial intelligence. An update to PHP was released on Wednesday, addressing the security leaks. While the patch was made available in the afternoon, many companies and organisations have not been able to update their websites.
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Ethical hacker Inti De Ceukelaire told the Belga News Agency that the increased risk also affected websites that aren't written in PHP. He took his personal websites offline, a measure he says he has never taken before.
"Thousands, tens of thousands, millions"
Co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare, a cloud platform and digital infrastructure provider, Matthew Prince stated that his company detected millions of attempts to exploit the security leaks within PHP.
"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."
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.
