A host of local council and national government websites were taken offline today amid cyber security fears triggered by a potential breach in Europe.
Among those affected were Edinburgh City Council, Bristol City Council, Oxfordshire CC, Oxford City Council, the Local Government Association, the Electoral Commission and at least five London boroughs.
At the time of writing, error messages were displayed on the Edinburgh, Oxfordshire, Oxford, Bristol, Lambeth, Ealing, Barking and Dagenham, Harrow and Barnet LBC websites.
A post by Oxfordshire said: “Unfortunately, we have had to take our main website down as a precaution while a known issue, affecting websites globally, is investigated. We don’t yet know when it will be back online but will continue to provide updates to the situation.
However, it appeared that a solution was being worked on, as the Local Government Association website, which was down for most of the day, was back in action at 3.45pm.
LGA sent out the following advice to councils: “Over the weekend there was a cyber-attack on a number of government websites including the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Student Loans Company. A small number of council websites have also been affected.
“The LGA is working closely with MHCLG, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Warning Advice Response Point (WARP) to monitor and respond to this where appropriate.
“Advice at this stage is for councils to liaise with WARP and actively monitor the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership and the NCSC websites.”
The NCSC warned: “Where immediate remediation is not feasible, organisations should consider taking the system offline until it can be fully mitigated.”
The problem emerged when government websites in Europe went offline after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language.
Developers of the PHP programming language said they had identified two critical vulnerabilities and urged users to update their sites as soon as a fix was released.
A statement said at 1.45pm that a new version fixing the vulnerabilities was live.
Government agencies in the Netherlands, France and Finland were among those that took sites offline ahead of the fix as a precaution.
PHP underpins large parts of the internet, raising concerns that a significant number of websites could be vulnerable to attack.
Image credit: TippaPatt/Shutterstock
The full story
This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.
