OMM Newsroom
Thirty-two UK government services are unavailable and four are partially unavailable amid an ongoing cybersecurity issue involving the PHP programming language, a minister told the House of Lords on Thursday, according to Anadolu Agency.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said the disruption “largely resulted” from precautionary measures to protect systems while updates and security mitigations were applied.
The government was working closely with agencies to “restore the services safely and securely”, Lloyd said.
She said authorities had acted before the vulnerability was publicly disclosed. Agencies had been alerted and advised to identify potentially affected systems, assess their exposure and prepare to apply security updates and mitigations.
The National Cyber Security Centre had sent “50,000 proactive notifications to the wider economy” advising businesses and other organisations on steps to take, Lloyd said.
“The government continues to monitor the situation closely and work with departments to maintain the security resilience and availability of public services,” she added.
Downing Street said no large public-facing critical services were affected, while acknowledging that some limited services might temporarily be offline as security work continued. “This does not mean they were hacked,” it added.
The vulnerability in PHP, which is widely used to develop websites, has prompted organisations around the world to secure potentially affected systems.
Internet infrastructure platform “Cloudflare” said on the US social media company “X” that it had observed “millions” of hacking attempts on its network. There was no evidence that the attempts had succeeded.
