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32 UK government services offline due to PHP security flaw

Summarised from 2 outlets · Updated 22 Oct, 13:32 · Archive

Thirty-two UK government services are offline and four partially unavailable following discovery of a critical security flaw in the programming language PHP.

Thirty-two UK government services have gone offline and four are partially unavailable following the discovery of a critical security flaw in PHP, the programming language used by the majority of websites. The outages are precautionary measures taken to protect systems while security updates are applied.

Tech minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra announced the figures to the House of Lords. Downing Street said no large public-facing critical services have been affected, with only 'limited' government websites going dark while issues are resolved. The government emphasised that the affected services 'does not mean they were hacked'.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is working with OpenAI, whose technology helped identify the vulnerabilities, as well as international partners. A Downing Street spokeswoman declined to provide a list of affected services, saying it was not 'standard practice' to do so. The NCSC has issued an update to its PHP alert following the release of mitigations and is encouraging UK organisations to take immediate action.

32 UK government services offline due to PHP security flaw
Image: Oxford Mail

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In this story: UK government · National Cyber Security Centre · OpenAI · Baroness Lloyd of Effra · Downing Street

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