{"id":937234,"date":"2026-10-22T19:22:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/937234\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T19:22:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:22:10","slug":"hacking-attempts-surge-as-websites-race-to-patch-php-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/937234\/","title":{"rendered":"Hacking attempts surge as websites race to patch PHP issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Millions of hacking attempts have been made since critical vulnerabilities were discovered in a key piece of internet software used by more than two-thirds of websites.<\/p>\n

Governments and major websites have rushed to patch two critical issues with PHP, a widely used computing language, after they were reportedly discovered by AI.<\/p>\n

Australia’s own cyber security agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, is among agencies around the world to issue urgent warnings for websites to implement a new patch.<\/p>\n

In some instances, governments have taken websites offline as a precautionary measure.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

AI helped discover the “critical” vulnerability. (ABC News: Scott Preston)<\/p>\n

Cloud services firm Cloudfare said since the two vulnerabilities were made public, hacking attempts had surged into the millions.<\/p>\n

“In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it,” Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince said in a post on X late on Wednesday, US time.<\/p>\n

“That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.”<\/p>\n

The developers of PHP released fixes for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI, urging users to “update immediately”.<\/p>\n

“I’ve not seen anything like this in a long, long time,” Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said at an event in Germany on Thursday, local time.<\/p>\n

He said the incident showed the importance of building software that can be maintained securely as systems grow more complex.<\/p>\n

“It was a long day and a long night, I know, for all the IT and security folks.”<\/p>\n

Government sites exposed to ‘critical’ PHP flaw<\/a><\/p>\n

The Australian Signals Directorate is among global cyber agencies urging organisations to quickly act to fix flaws in a programming language that hackers are believed to be exploiting.<\/p>\n

Several Asian governments ordered cybersecurity inspections related to the PHP vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n

China’s industry ministry urged organisations and users to inspect systems and upgrade to the latest secure version of PHP.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also recommended strengthening cybersecurity monitoring and changing accounts, passwords and keys where necessary.<\/p>\n

South Korea raised its private-sector cybersecurity alert level and activated emergency response measures, citing concerns over an increased risk of hacking attacks.<\/p>\n

ABC\/Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Millions of hacking attempts have been made since critical vulnerabilities were discovered in a key piece of internet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":937235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[256,254,64,63,99,12460,8886,114614],"class_list":["post-937234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-hack","tag-hacking","tag-php"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=937234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/937235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=937234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=937234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=937234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}