Dozens of Government services offline as cyber security fears erupt | UK

Thirty-two Government services are offline and four are partially unavailable amid a programming language PHP cyber security issue , a minister has said in the House of Lords. Baroness Lloyd, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said the number of government services that are unavailable has "largely resulted" from precautionary measures taken to protect systems while updates and mitigations are applied.

She told the House of Lords: " The Government continues to monitor the situation closely and work with departments to maintain the security, resilience, and availability of public services." Baroness Lloyd added the government "acted proactively ahead of public disclosure" and that the National Cyber Security Centre was able to co-ordinate with cyber companies before the news was made public.

Following the emergence of the PHP vulnerability, 50,000 notifications were sent to businesses and organisations outlining the necessary steps they should take. This comes after Downing Street said that "some" limited government services "may be offline" while security work is being carried out to address potential cyber security issues. It did not specify which services are included, but said that no large UK public-facing critical services will be affected.

A spokesperson said: "Our work has begun with OpenAI and NCSC to fix vulnerabilities in government systems. No large public-facing services affected, some smaller services down for update, but not hacked."

The spokeswoman added that it was not “standard practice” to provide a list of Government services that were affected. Downing Street stated that work is already underway to identify and resolve vulnerabilities within its systems, with its experts collaborating closely with OpenAI and international partners.

The issue has also impacted gaming platforms, Amazon and online forums like Wikipedia. The code, which is used by almost 70% of websites that people visit on a daily basis, powers a range of popular platforms like WordPress.

Many attempts at exploiting the vulnerability were spotted within hours of it being announced, according to Amazon and Cloudfare. UK cybersecurity chiefs alerted organisations to the "critical security issue" on Wednesday.

In an update published on the Amazon Web Services security blog, the company said its threat intelligence team found the issue was “now being broadly exploited in the wild”.

Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander said week’s Budget has not been compromised after the website for the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the official spending watchdog, was affected.

Mr Alexander told Times Radio on Thursday morning: “No, I’ve had no indication whatsoever that there’s any problem in terms of a breach of Budget security.

“Indeed John Healey, who I was with yesterday in Scotland, as I understand it initiated new security protocols reflecting his experience in the Ministry of Defence when he came to the Treasury as Chancellor in the summer.”