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Farid Farid
Australia’s own cybersecurity agency has been exposed to a critical programming language flaw in a global breach that could be exploited by hackers.
The Australian Signals Directorate, the peak intelligence body intercepting cybersecurity threats, said its website had been among other Australian government sites affected by an issue with software that powers much of the internet.
“We are aware of an outage that may be affecting government websites, including the agency said on social media late on Tuesday.
“Organisations and individuals using PHP within their environments should monitor and review PHP official guidance, and apply security patches as they become available.”
Several government websites in Europe and Asia went offline as a precaution after a disclosure of two critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators globally scrambling to protect their systems.
PHP is a programming language used to run websites and powers millions of sites that depend on popular application such as WordPress.
When a visitor loads a page, a server running PHP blockembles the content and sends it to the browser.
The flaw in PHP was discovered using an artificial intelligence tool.
Developers of the PHP programming language released urgent new fixes on Wednesday to vulnerabilities that had quietly been lurking in their software for years.
“The potential impact is enormous,” said Ismael Valenzuela, vice president of labs, threat research and intelligence at cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf, adding that PHP powers roughly 70 per cent of websites where the server-side programming language is known.
With reports that hackers were exploiting the flaws to break into websites, government agencies in the Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline ahead of the fix as a precaution.
The Dutch prime minister said he was closely monitoring the situation and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also urged website owners to use a new fix.
AAP has contacted the Department of Home Affairs for comment.
More to come
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