Government websites and public services across Europe went offline this week following the discovery of two critical security vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that powers millions of sites worldwide.
The flaws, hidden in the code for more than a decade, were uncovered with the help of artificial intelligence tools. After security patches were released, experts warned that hackers could use those same AI tools to learn how to exploit the weaknesses and attack sites that have not yet been updated.
In the Netherlands, authorities shut down government portals, the Port of Rotterdam website, the football association's site and hospital pages. France moved all Interior Ministry sites into preventive maintenance mode. Denmark and Finland took public services offline, including Denmark's school communication system.
Wikipedia and the Internet Archive also took defensive measures, temporarily disabling parts of their systems.
According to data from cybersecurity firm Censys, around 1.5 million of the 2.6 million servers examined were still running versions of PHP for which no patch was available.
