Internet rushes to apply PHP emergency patch for security

The open-source coding language PHP issued an emergency patch with code fixes on Wednesday after discovering a critical remote code vulnerability, according to the PHP website. Nearly 24 million live websites run on PHP, according to BuiltWith, a web intelligence platform. Some of the largest websites using PHP backend integrations include Wikipedia and those published with WordPress. World News Group’s website, wng.org, was also taken down on Wednesday morning while a hosting vendor applied the emergency patch.

What was the issue? Two vulnerabilities could allow hackers to gain remote access to web servers without authorized login, PHP explained. The open-source coding group encouraged all users to update their systems to integrate the new system patches. Websites went dark during the emergency fix to protect their sites from bots and hackers exploiting the now-publicized vulnerability on Wednesday morning.

Is it true that Amazon was one of the vulnerable sites? A number of internet technology software tools offered on Amazon’s subsidiary cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, were impacted by the emergency patch. However, the larger platform operated by Amazon Inc. did not seem to have been impacted. Amazon Web Services manages data centers across the world, leasing web tools and IT infrastructure that businesses and developers lease out, freeing up companies from buying and maintaining their own physical servers. Hundreds of thousands of websites, including WORLD News Group, use PHP-based Amazon Web Services tools. 

Amazon Web Services made headlines a year ago for a large outage caused by a different technical problem. A domain name system issue impacted Google, Delta Airlines, online broker Robinhood, and the digital payment service Venmo.