The Petersburg Borough’s website was down for several hours on Wednesday — and it wasn’t the only one.
Operators around the world have taken websites offline to make urgent security updates.
Flaws in a widely used programming language, called PHP, exposed many websites to two “critical” vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit to steal personal information about users. Roughly 70% of the internet is powered by the PHP language.
Tara Alcock is Petersburg’s library director. She also helps manage posts on the Borough’s website. She said she didn’t know the site would be offline until she saw it herself on Wednesday morning.
“Have you heard about the PHP security flaws that are affecting a lot of websites this week?” she said. “I went to look at the website this morning, and it was down.”
Instead of the Borough’s website, it was a mostly blank page with an error message.
CivicPlus provides website services for the Borough. It took websites offline temporarily while addressing the security vulnerability. A status page for its products said the move was a precaution, and there’s “no evidence” customer data was compromised.
The PHP project released fixes for the vulnerabilities Wednesday morning, advising users to update systems as soon as possible.
The Borough’s website was back online around 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday.
Alcock said that afternoon she was “really glad” the website was available again.
The nonprofit PHP Foundation, and a number of media outlets, report that artificial intelligence agents helped uncover the vulnerabilities.
In other cyber-related Borough news, the Oct. 21 temporary website disruption was not related to the recently announced ransomware attack the Borough experienced this summer. That was a different incident and, according to a notice, no personally identifiable information was exposed in that attack, which has since been resolved.
