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Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators scrambling to protect their systems.<\/strong><\/p>\n Developers \u200bof the PHP programming language said Tuesday they had identified two critical vulnerabilities and urged \u200busers to update their sites as soon as a fix was released. \u2060With reports that hackers were already exploiting the flaws to break into websites, government agencies in \u200bthe Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.<\/p>\n PHP underpins large \u200bparts of the internet, raising concerns that a significant number of websites could be vulnerable to attack.<\/p>\n \u201cPHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful \u200blot of software that doesn\u2019t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,\u201d cybersecurity company \u200bHuntress said in a blog post.<\/p>\n Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare, \u200csaid \u2060that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its firewall rules as a stopgap measure.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update,\u201d he said on X.<\/p>\n Wordfence, a security \u200bplugin that protects WordPress \u200bwebsites, said all WordPress \u2060sites run on a PHP-installed server. It warned that automatic updates would not apply the fix and advised site owners to find out who \u200bis responsible for updating PHP on their sites.<\/p>\n Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, \u200bAustralia, Japan and \u2060Britain have urged PHP users to update immediately or take websites offline until patches can be applied. The Dutch cybersecurity agency itself went offline, saying it had done so as a precaution because \u2060of \u200bthe vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP \u200b5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n