The global security concerns that forced South Ribble's website offline
The website is back and operarting as normal.
Leaders at South Ribble Borough Council took the authority’s website offline yesterday, amid a global security concern.
Organisations around the world scrambled to fix newly discovered vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language that underpins much of the internet. The exposed flaw would have allowed hackers to carry out cyber-attacks
Cyber-security firm Wiz - one of the companies whose researchers uncovered the vulnerabilities - described the flaws as the "most severe" ever detected by AI.
SRBC’s website was down for several hours, but was restored on Wednesday evening. No security breaches have been announced.
A spokesman for the council said: “We were alerted by the National Cyber Security Centre yesterday about a universal security concern also affecting our websites. As a precaution our websites were taken offline. The issue has been addressed and our websites were back online the same day following the critical security updates."
A number of Scottish councils and health boards also took their websites offline on Wednesday after issues were detected.
NHS Scotland was among those to take its sites down for a period while the flaws were rectified, with visitors given a message reassuring them they would be "back soon".
What is PHP?
PHP is an open-source scripting language that is over 30 years old, and used in much of the internet. Content management systems and publishing template systems such as Wordpress are built on PHP.
An estimated 70 per cent of websites use PHP, including Wikipedia and Facebook.