Software vulnerabilities drive global institutions to suspend services

Two critical security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language have driven government institutions, banks, and companies in Japan and Finland to proactively suspend some of their online services, amid a surge in attempts to exploit the flaws that allow remote code execution without authentication.

Two critical security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language have driven government institutions, banks, and companies in several countries to proactively suspend some of their online services. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to execute remote code without needing to log in. Reuters reported that disruptions affected institutions in Japan and Finland. Cloudflare said attack attempts escalated rapidly after details of the vulnerabilities were published, while Amazon reported widespread activity targeting vulnerable systems. In Japan, banking institutions and companies in the aviation and railway sectors suspended some services. In Finland, the Government IT Services Agency stated that restarting the affected websites could take days or weeks.