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Companies, governments push to fix PHP flaws as hacking attempts surge worldwide
- IBJ Bureau
- Oct 23, 2026
Global companies and governments rushed to patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of theinternet.
The remedial measures coincide with cloud companies reporting a surge of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.
The push came after governments in Europe and elsewhere took websites offline as a precaution, while website operators scrambled to secure systems running the software.
The emergency shutdowns of banking, airline, rail, tax and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki mark one of the most dramatic tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running, exposing how deeply governments and companies depend on code that few people understand.
“I have not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany, adding that the incident showed the importance of buildingsoftware that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex.
The developers of PHP, a computing language like HTML and Python, released fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI.
They urged users to “update immediately”.
Madeline Lawrence, co-founder of Belgian cybersecurity firm Aikido Security, said that details of the flaws had become public before fixes were ready,with attacks reported since.
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