South Korea Hits Cyber Alert After Critical PHP Flaws Trigger Hacking Risk
Seoul raised its private-sector cybersecurity alert and warned 28,000 companies to patch PHP vulnerabilities that let attackers run commands, steal data or take sites offline.
SEOUL, Oct 22 (Reuters) - South Korea's government raised its private-sector cybersecurity alert level and activated emergency response measures on Thursday after critical flaws were discovered in the PHP web programming language, increasing the risk of hacking attacks.
Here are some details:
• The presidential National Security Office on Thursday convened an emergency meeting with intelligence, defence and science ministry officials to review responses across the public, private and military sectors, according to a presidential press release.
• The science ministry said it had issued security guidance to about 28,000 companies with registered chief information security officers and 5,900 members of a government information sharing network as well as operators of critical infrastructure, web-hosting firms and data centres.
• The government urged organisations to install security updates released by PHP developers on Wednesday and take temporary safeguards where immediate patching was not possible.
• The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to run malicious commands without authentication, steal data or take websites offline, the science ministry said.
• PHP developers issued emergency fixes on Wednesday after vulnerability details were leaked and attempted attacks reported in multiple countries.
(Reporting by Kyu-seok Shim; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Ros Russell)
