Cyberattackers have made “millions” of attempts to take advantage of a critical hole in a building block of the internet, a key cyber service provider said on Thursday. Cybersecurity agencies worldwide scrambled on Wednesday to respond to a flaw in PHP, a foundational computer programming language used to underpin 70% of the internet. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks — giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing — said in a post on X that it’s seen “millions” of “attempts to exploit” the flaw.
It saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, meaning information must have leaked, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said. Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.” Numerous European government departments took their websites offline as a precaution. As of Thursday morning, key French websites such as the justice ministry and the data protection authority said they were undergoing maintenance.
Matthijs van Amelsfort, the head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, told POLITICO that his agency has no indication that the flaw is “actively being misused” but said that can change, particularly because AI makes it easier to exploit flaws. The agency took its website offline on Wednesday, but it is now back up.
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