The FSB security service’s cybersecurity division has told Russia’s critical infrastructure operators to temporarily take down websites if they cannot immediately patch critical flaws in the PHP programming language that were uncovered using AI, the RBC outlet reported Thursday.
Operators were ordered to apply emergency software patches, run full antivirus scans and report any suspicious activity.
“Consider temporarily restricting external access to vulnerable web servers up to and including shutting them down,” the security alert reportedly stated.
The FSB order applies to communication networks and information systems across government agencies, as well as financial, energy, transportation, medical and other companies.
Its directive mirrors that of the U.S. National Security Agency, as well as authorities from the EU and China, after PHP programmers released a fix for the critical vulnerability on Wednesday.
The flaws had been reported privately to PHP’s developers and kept confidential while a fix was prepared.
Global firms and governments rushed on Thursday to patch PHP flaws as cloud firms reported a surge of hacking attempts after the vulnerabilities were disclosed.
As companies and governments deployed patches and suspended websites as a precaution, hacking attempts surged into the millions, according to cloud services firm Cloudflare and Amazon.
Tech experts warned in comments to RBC that “tens or hundreds of thousands” of Russian websites remain vulnerable to cyberattacks due to widespread reliance on PHP across the country.
More than 90% of Russian-language websites and almost 70% of the web globally run on PHP, according to the W3Techs platform.
AFP and Reuters contributed reporting.
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