AI-Assisted Discovery of Critical PHP Vulnerability Prompts Emergency Shutdown of Government Websites in Multiple European Countries

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+1 AI discovers severe vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language: 70% of websites worldwide may be at risk, and government websites in multiple European countries have been urgently taken offline. The Paper reporter Wu Yuli, 2026-10-22 11:19 Source: The Paper ∙ 10% Company > Listen to full text Font size

Two severe security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language discovered with AI assistance have prompted government websites and public service platforms in multiple countries to be urgently taken offline.

According to foreign media reports, on October 21 local time, the cybersecurity company Calif, in cooperation with OpenAI, used AI models to discover a severe vulnerability in the PHP programming language. Google's cybersecurity company Wiz also independently discovered related vulnerabilities. As details of the vulnerabilities were disclosed, government websites and public service platforms in multiple European countries took temporary offline measures to prevent exploitation of the vulnerabilities.

The PHP development team released a security update on October 21. Public information shows that PHP is a programming language widely used for website back-end development. Among websites whose server-side programming language can be identified, about 70% use PHP, so the related vulnerabilities may affect a large number of internet services.

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity issues a statement warning about the PHP vulnerabilities

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) issued a joint statement on October 21 saying that the vulnerabilities may allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on affected servers without authentication, thereby compromising websites and their back-end systems.

Foreign media, citing statistics from the cybersecurity company Censys, reported that as of October 21, it had detected about 2.58 million internet-accessible PHP hosts, of which about 1.58 million could have their PHP version number identified. Among these, about 1.576 million reported version numbers earlier than this security fix version. However, Censys emphasized that some systems may have already been fixed through patches, so the above figures cannot be directly equated with the actual number of hosts with exploitable vulnerabilities.

According to reports, some government websites and public service platforms in the Netherlands, Finland, France, Germany and other countries took temporary offline measures.

The Netherlands temporarily shut down its government portal, the Port of Rotterdam website, and some hospital and political party websites; Finland's national information technology service provider Valtori suspended some government public network services; some local administrative institution websites in France entered a maintenance state; and Germany's federal information technology service provider ITZBund also shut down some websites. These measures were mainly to reduce risks before security update deployment was completed.

EU cybersecurity agencies recommended that relevant organizations identify all applications using PHP, prioritize fixing systems directly exposed to the internet, and coordinate updates with hosting service providers. Those temporarily unable to complete fixes should consider isolating the relevant applications from public networks.

In China, Tencent Cloud Security Center, the Alibaba Cloud security team, and QiAnXin CERT also simultaneously issued risk notices, warning that the vulnerability is a high-risk remote code execution vulnerability requiring no authentication, and that attackers can craft specially designed multipart POST requests to trigger memory corruption, directly take over servers, and steal business data. All three organizations reminded relevant enterprises to quickly conduct asset self-checks and upgrade to the corresponding PHP security version to complete fixes.

OpenAI mentioned in an announcement posted on its official website, "Over the past two months, we led the formation of a coalition of maintainers, researchers, and security service providers to jointly address severe vulnerabilities in PHP... Given the severity of these vulnerabilities and the widespread use of PHP, we believe this is one of the most impactful security issues in recent years."

OpenAI also said, "Although these vulnerabilities are significant, they are only part of the multiple major vulnerabilities we have discovered and are working to fix. We expect similar discoveries to increase substantially in the coming months." Responsible editor: Li Yuequn Image editor: Chen Feiyan Proofreader: Zhang Yan The Paper news tip: 021-962866 The Paper, unauthorized reproduction is prohibited +1 Favorite I want to report #Severe security vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language #OpenAI View more