The home page of the lower house of the Dutch parliament was among scores of government websites throughout Europe taken offline as a precautionary measure following the discovery of vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language used to build websites.
On Wednesday, CERT-EU, the European Union’s cybersecurity service, issued an urgent alert about the PHP security vulnerability. The organization urged government agencies to temporarily take down the affected websites to protect the system.
Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer for Cloudflare, a global cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity company, said on X that they were seeing “early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a stopgap only.
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“These vulnerabilities affect websites worldwide and make it possible to remotely control a server,” a Dutch government spokesperson told the Amsterdam-based NL Times newspaper. “This could potentially allow malicious actors to gain control of the server.”
The developers of the PHP programming language said later Wednesday that they had released a set of updates fixing two previously identified critical vulnerabilities, according to Britain’s Sky News.
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