PHP security vulnerability triggers millions of exploit attempts, Cloudflare warns

Critical PHP security vulnerabilities unleashed millions of exploitation attempts as all the websites including the government ones in Europe and elsewhere went dark after having been affected by the security flaw.

The formidable warning comes from the Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince who wrote on X, “In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, ​across the network we saw thousands of attempts ​to exploit it. That jumped to tens of ⁠thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds ​of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”

In the wake of this warning, the UK government also announced that it is working to find any traces of exploitation and “potential exposure in its online services.”

"Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated," the NCSC said in a note.

The major tech companies including Amazon are also racing against the clock to protect the systems from potential cases of manipulation.

According to Amazon Web Services, this PHP security flaw is not being broadly exploited in the wild and hackers tried to get leverage from the vulnerabilities.

The security vulnerabilities had remained hidden in PHP software for years until they were recently uncovered using artificial intelligence.

PHP developers released urgent fixes and urged all users and website operators to update their systems immediately.

Cybersecurity experts have urged all the users to apply these patches and if they are unable they must shut their websites down.

Alp Toker, a cyber security expert and director at NetBlocks, called the issue "highly impactful" while adding “that anybody on the web can essentially access your web server if you're running the [PHP] software".

Given the role of agentic AI in reproducing such attacks, he added “These systems are going to continue to get compromised - month after month, year after year.”