CANBERRA, Oct. 22 (Xinhua) -- Australian government websites were among those affected on Wednesday night and Thursday following the detection of critical flaws in the PHP programming language.
The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) initially said on Wednesday night that the website for its own Australian Cyber Security Centre was among the government websites that had reported outages after the PHP Foundation identified two critical vulnerabilities in the programming language.
In a critical alert update released on Thursday, the ASD advised individuals and organizations to identify PHP within their environments and prepare to apply security patches as they become available.
A spokesperson for the government agency said that some organizations had decided to take their websites offline as a precaution until a patch was available.
Local media reported that websites for other agencies, including the Australian Taxation Office, the Health Department and the Australian Communications and Media Authority, were all limited to varying degrees.
A spokesperson for Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said that the National Office of Cyber Security was aware of disruptions to several websites, including government websites, and that work was underway to mitigate risks. ■