Dozens of government services are offline after they were hit by a major cyber-security issue affecting millions of sites worldwide, reports BritPanorama.
A total of 32 government services are temporarily offline, and four are partially unavailable, ministers confirmed on Thursday morning.
No 10 stated that no major public-facing critical services have been affected by this issue, which concerns a severe vulnerability identified in the PHP programming language used by almost 70 per cent of websites.
A cabinet minister insisted that next week’s Budget remains secure, despite the shutdown of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) website.
Organizations across the globe have been scrambling to address the flaw in PHP, which powers a significant proportion of the web according to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare. UK cybersecurity officials alerted organizations to the “critical security issue” earlier this week.
A No 10 spokeswoman noted that efforts are underway across government to identify and rectify potential exposures within systems. “No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out,” she said.
She clarified that this does not indicate any form of breach, and work continues to resolve outstanding issues. However, it is not standard practice to specify which government services have been impacted.
Tech minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra confirmed the extent of the service outages in the House of Lords, stating: “The information I have is that 32 Government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable.”
Douglas Alexander, the secretary of state for Scotland, urged businesses concerned about the PHP vulnerability to refer to the National Cyber Security Centre for guidance. He reassured the public that the budget has not been compromised, following the OBR’s website being taken offline.
PHP developers released urgent fixes for vulnerabilities that have existed in the software for years and urged users to update immediately. Despite these measures, hacking attempts surged, with Cloudflare reporting significant increases in attempted exploits soon after the issue was publicly disclosed.
“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” said Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, noting a dramatic rise in attempts following the announcement of the vulnerability.
The widespread shutdown of critical services highlights the significant reliance on PHP within both public and private sectors, revealing vulnerabilities that cybersecurity measures must continuously address.
