PHP Vulnerability Draws Millions of Exploitation Attempts

A newly disclosed vulnerability in PHP has drawn millions of exploitation attempts across Cloudflare’s network, while emergency defenses have left some government websites offline in Europe and elsewhere.

Cloudflare’s network logged thousands of exploitation attempts during the 10 hours before the flaw became public. In the first 45 minutes after disclosure, the figure jumped to tens of thousands. Within two hours, the count reached hundreds of thousands and has since climbed into the millions.

Operators around the world moved quickly to protect their systems after the vulnerability was disclosed Wednesday. Some government websites in Europe and other regions went offline as those protective measures were put in place. The outages show a service disruption accompanying the response.

Cloudflare’s figure tracks attempted exploitation, rather than a tally of confirmed intrusions. PHP is a widely used programming language.