North Korean sites go dark while PHP flaw sparks global panic

North Korean government and state media websites have been offline for 24 hours following the disclosure of a major PHP vulnerability that left 70% of the world’s websites open to hackers.

PHP, the scripting language powering these websites, was discovered to have a major bug that could allow hackers to execute code remotely.

This discovery led to a global panic and resulted in companies and governments across the globe shutting down their sites as they attempt to fix the problem.

Countries carrying out these shutdowns include the Netherlands, France, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Australia, and North Korea.

Internet analysts NetBlocks also logged an “ongoing disruption” to North Korea’s internet during the panic while claiming international users are unable to access the country’s .kp domain.

PHP incident causes exploits to rise

Cloudflare co-founder Matthew Prince revealed that in the 10 hours leading up to the public disclosure of the vulnerability, Cloudflare witnessed “thousands of attempts to exploit it.”

He warned, “That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and millions now.”

Crypto exchange Binance ups security

The world’s largest crypto exchange Binance claims it has implemented safeguards ahead of the release of an official patch that will mitigate the ongoing PHP security vulnerability.

Co-founder Changpeng Zhao warned users to be “extra careful” when visiting websites as “some web admins are not always up-to-date with security patches.”

Executive Director of Growth for Binance’s $BNB Chain, Nina Rong, clarified that $BNB Chain “does not use PHP in our tech stack.”

Crypto exchange MEXC and crypto wallet Trust Wallet also claim they’ve not been affected by the vulnerability since neither firm uses PHP infrastructure.

MEXC added that third parties employed by the firm that do use it “have completed the necessary fixes.”