On October 21, due to the discovery of serious security vulnerabilities in the widely used PHP programming language, multiple government websites across Europe and other regions were forced offline on Wednesday, prompting website operators to take urgent measures to protect system security. The PHP development team announced on Tuesday that two severe security flaws had been identified and urged users to update immediately after the release of the fix. On Wednesday, the PHP team confirmed that a new version addressing the vulnerabilities had been officially released. However, reports indicated that hackers were exploiting these vulnerabilities to breach websites, leading government agencies in countries such as the Netherlands and Finland to proactively shut down some sites before the patch was made available. PHP is one of the most widely used programming languages on the internet, supporting website platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. According to website technology statistics agency W3Techs, approximately 75% of websites that can identify their programming language use PHP. About 43% of websites globally are powered by WordPress, covering blogs, small business sites, government portals, e-commerce platforms, and news websites. This security incident has resulted in widespread disruptions to websites across multiple European countries, including the Port of Rotterdam, the government portal Overheid.nl, the Royal Netherlands Football Association, the websites of the country's five major political parties, and several hospital websites, all of which have been temporarily shut down.
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