Last week, it emerged that two vulnerabilities in PHP could allow access to servers without login credentials. PHP is a programming language used by most websites.
The IT world reacted quickly to the alert. Authorities and companies in several countries shut down their websites.
In Umeå, the municipality shut down several systems as a precaution after learning about the vulnerabilities. Most have since been brought back online.
"This incident means several weeks of follow-up work to upgrade systems," operations manager Mattias Wallmark tells the municipality's website.
Activated crisis management
Södertälje Municipality activated its crisis management team.
"Joining a central crisis management team is not something we do regularly. We did so because we saw an imminent risk to our digital environment," says security manager Emir Gazibegovic.
The municipality has since reviewed all its systems and servers, but has found no damage or signs of intrusion.
The risk was so serious that ignoring it would have been irresponsible. The cost of calling in staff, and the impact this actually had on the organization, was minimal compared with the risks of blindly trusting that “this will work out.”
The National Cyber Security Center, which issued a warning about the vulnerabilities, has received a number of incident reports, says John Billow.
But they have primarily been about taking the preventive measures we recommended.
The vulnerabilities have proved more difficult to exploit than feared.
There have been many attempts, but they have not been successful on any broad scale, he says.
“Significantly less”
As AI is used to find problems in existing code, Billow believes that more alerts like this can be expected.
Then we need to keep a cool head, he says, adding that he thinks that is what happened in this case.
The consequences have been "significantly less than the initial worrying picture suggested," says cybersecurity expert Henrik Bergqvist at Cisco.
The fact that the alert was so loud may have made a difference, he says.
I think the attention was useful, because people quickly put different types of protection in place.
PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page.” It is a programming language used to build many popular websites.
The programming language was created over 30 years ago to make it easier to build websites. PHP is combined with HTML code and lowered the barrier to creating more advanced websites. HTML is the type of code, or language, that all websites are built from.
Many major content management systems (CMS) and blogging tools, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, are built in PHP.
The vulnerabilities mean that a hacker can send a malicious request to vulnerable servers without logging in, in order to take control of them and the information stored there.
