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Dutch National Cyber Security Center is Offline because it uses PHP

257 points • by jacquesm • today at 12:31 PM • 86 comments • view on HN

Comments

geerlingguy • today at 12:55 PM

Tons of sites are currently offline to hopefully prevent an attack until they can update PHP; just the things I've run into this morning: OBS, TicketTailor, tons of wikis...

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mkesper • today at 12:57 PM

That's why (mostly) static sites should be delivered as static HTML.

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stingraycharles • today at 12:57 PM

Which kind of makes sense, I think a lot of Dutch websites have been taken offline. I think it’s due to recent regulations that have been introduced.

I think, given the (supposed) seriousness of this issue, it’s an adequate response. I suspect Cloudflare et al will have rules added to their managed WAFs within a few hours after release as well.

That said: it seems like the core issue is that they can’t release PHP publicly without revealing the exploit, wouldn’t it have made more sense to coordinate in the background with these organizations, and important distros, so that this could have been patched without revealing the exploit?

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sam_lowry_ • today at 1:12 PM

Also the Belgian Centre for Cybersecurity is down https://ccb.belgium.be/

Dark day for Drupal and Wordpress, heh

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freecodeio • today at 1:13 PM

my thoughts and prayers to the stubborn php 4-6 developers who refused to upgrade since 7 and now they have breaking changes with the new 9.2

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WJW • today at 12:50 PM

Well, the public website of the NCSC is offline. Who knows what crazy proprietary stuff they have.

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tosti • today at 12:53 PM

PHP is going to publish the patch in 5 minutes, right? On their website which runs on... Perl Catalyst? Ruby on Rails? Django? What could possibly go wrong?

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aequitas • today at 2:10 PM

Lots of obsolete PHP still being used by the Dutch government: https://basisbeveiliging.nl/museum/NL/

amosj • today at 1:33 PM

Also explainxkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

> Today, a remote code execution vulnerability was found in PHP, called php2shell. [...] Since explain xkcd is affected by this exploit, I have decided to take the wiki down until tomorrow.

Hamuko • today at 12:51 PM

Finnish state services too.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20252600

dmitrijbelikov • today at 1:21 PM

Never enough blame PHP/s

louwrentius • today at 1:11 PM

It's easy to harp on PHP but I wonder if we're going to get this kind of vulnerabilities in languages like Python or Go soon too.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 • today at 1:15 PM

All my favorite private trackers such as empornium are down :(

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gaiagraphia • today at 1:33 PM

>The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC)

>Safely ahead in a digitally resilient Netherlands.

Things being offline seems like a daily occurrence recently. Is it a co-incidence? Is it AI? Are Russia/Iran doing an e-blitzkrieg?

If it's a combination of all three, surely nation states are going to unleash everything possible right now and do as much damage before the world adapts and becomes resilient?

If the latter, would be interesting to put an actual cost on all this downtime and whether it's actually making any impact, or is just noise/free training.

rasz • today at 1:29 PM

so is Australian one https://www.cyber.gov.au. It was still working ~hour ago just returning 403 on alerts subsection https://www.cyber.gov.au/alert/critical-vulnerabilities-in-p... but now its whole thing.

phplovesong • today at 1:22 PM

PHP strikes again.

ltbarcly3 • today at 4:39 PM

Now you will get a taste of life in the new world order, one without Pax Bitterballen.

dortesedixson • today at 2:05 PM

[flagged]

andsoitis • today at 1:18 PM

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