Canada Takes Government Websites Offline Over PHP Flaws

Canadian authorities took some federal websites offline on October 21 as a precaution after critical vulnerabilities were disclosed in PHP, a widely used programming language. Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon said the move followed guidance from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and that affected sites would be restored after patches were applied. The PHP Foundation said it released fixes and update instructions on October 21. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to run code remotely on affected systems, according to cybersecurity advisories. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said it had seen reports of possible exploitation but identified no active exploitation at that time. The full scope of the Canadian outages was not specified. Statistics Canada’s website remained unavailable on the morning of October 22, according to an outage bulletin. Other sites reported offline on October 21 included the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and Measurement Canada. British Columbia also said it had taken some webpages offline as a precaution and that teams were working to restore services. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said the company observed thousands...