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PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.<\/p>\n
It’s a programming language which runs on a web server, behind the scenes of a website, and effectively lets you see the sites you visit.<\/p>\n
When you go to a site, PHP is the code which collects data and effectively turns it into a page you can read.<\/p>\n
It was developed in the early 1990s to help serve dynamic web pages and applications, but still powers lots of platforms today. <\/p>\n
PHP has been used across a wide range of platforms including Wikipedia, online shops and WordPress \u2013 the system behind many websites – as well as to write tools to build web apps, with Laravel, Symfony and Drupal among popular PHP frameworks.<\/p>\n
According to cyber-security firm Wiz, which helped uncover the critical PHP vulnerabilities surfaced this week, PHP powers 70% of the world’s websites. <\/p>\n
And it said the flaws – now coined “php2shell” – were inherent in the language itself, affecting many past versions of it.<\/p>\n
The PHP Foundation, the non-profit which maintains the programming language, warned this meant that, under the right conditions, an unauthenticated attacker would be able to remotely execute code on servers running PHP.<\/p>\n
Some large organisations said they had seen a high volume of attempts to breach their systems.<\/p>\n
Matthew Prince, the boss of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, wrote on X on Thursday that the company saw “thousands” of attempts to exploit the PHP vulnerabilities across its network in the 10 hours before it was publicly announced.<\/p>\n
“That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions now,” he added.<\/p>\n
Amazon also says it saw hackers attempt to exploit the flaws, but its websites were operating as normal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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‘Serious vulnerability’<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n