A critical coding language vulnerability is taking websites offline over hack fears

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent website operators scrambling to protect their systems. Developers ​of the PHP programming language said Tuesday they had identified two critical vulnerabilities, and urged ​users to update their sites as soon as a fix was released. ⁠With reports that hackers were already exploiting the flaws to break into websites, government agencies in ​the Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline as a precaution.PHP underpins large ​parts of the internet, raising concerns that a significant number of websites could be vulnerable to attack. Get daily National news Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you'll never miss the day's top stories. “PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful ​lot of software that doesn’t even advertise that it runs PHP under the hood,” cybersecurity company ​Huntress said in a blog post. Story continues below advertisement Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud se...