A significant number of websites have gone offline, and that’s not due to a service outage, but rather a deliberate decision by the site’s owners.

The reason is because extremely dangerous security vulnerabilities have been found in a protocol used by most websites – PHP. This issue is unrelated to the separate vulnerability discovered in web certificates …

What is PHP?

PHP is one of the weirder acronyms around. While it originally stood for Personal Home Page, it’s now more usually defined as the recursive “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.”

PHP is an open-source, general-purpose scripting language, very well suited to web development and able to be embedded into HTML. It’s used by around 70% of all websites.

What happened?

AI models and a cybersecurity researcher simultaneously discovered a major security flaw in PHP in mid-August. A combination of two vulnerabilities allowed an exploit which could give an attacker direct access to the underlying file system or database behind a website.…