Companies and governments worldwide are racing to secure their systems after critical vulnerabilities in the widely used PHP programming language triggered millions of hacking attempts.
The disclosure has prompted emergency security measures, with organisations taking websites and online services offline while applying software fixes.
The incident has highlighted the risks facing digital infrastructure that relies on widely used software, as cybersecurity experts warn that attackers can exploit vulnerabilities on a large scale.
According to Cloudflare, hacking attempts surged within hours of the vulnerabilities becoming public. Matthew Prince, chief executive of the cloud services company, said the firm had detected thousands of attempts to exploit the flaws in the 10 hours before the announcement.
It shot up to the tens of thousands in just 45 minutes after the disclosure was made, and the number was already in the hundreds of thousands in less than two hours.
Developers of PHP released patches on Wednesday and urged people to update their systems immediately. The bugs had been there in the code for several years now but were discovered only recently with the help of AI.
Madeline Lawrence, one of the co-founders of the Belgian cyber security firm, Aikido Security, says that information about the bugs became public even before any patches were ready, making it possible for the attackers to take advantage of it.
The vulnerabilities have prompted precautionary shutdowns across several countries, affecting services linked to banking, aviation, railways, taxation and government administration.
Some Japanese companies such as brokerage Nomura, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA and railway East Japan announced that they were going to suspend some of their online services due to safety precaution measures.
Another company, Tokio Marine Holdings, announced the suspension of the website of its affiliate company. Some departments of the Japanese government, such as the Ministry of Finance, Meteorological Agency and the National Tax Agency, were also affected.
In Europe, several organisations in the Netherlands, Finland and France also took websites or services offline. French telecoms group Orange temporarily suspended access to certain PHP-based websites and applications across several subsidiaries.
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Finland's state IT services provider Valtori continued installing security patches overnight and began gradually lifting precautionary service restrictions after government public web services were taken offline.
Valtori Director General Hannu Naumanen warned that restoring services could take days or weeks for its systems to be carefully tested after updates.
While Tencent Cloud recommended clients update their PHP versions, cybersecurity organizations in various nations have appealed for urgent measures to safeguard potentially compromised systems.
This incident has highlighted once again the importance of ensuring that such software used by many is properly secured, especially considering that attackers are known to exploit such vulnerabilities soon after they have been publicly disclosed.