After the leak— which meant information about the bugs was in the open before the fix was ready — confusion quickly ensued, with government bodies and private companies choosing to temporarily shut down their websites rather than risk potentially damaging breaches to their data and the sites themselves.
Early Thursday, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks, giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing, said in a post on X that it had seen “millions” of attempts to exploit the flaw.
Cloudflare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.
Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”
One senior U.S. government cyber official said that federal authorities have been overwhelmed — and not just by PHP. The same day the world was racing to address PHP, they were also dealing with bugs in node.js, a widely used JavaScript framework, Fortinet, GitHub and Oracle.
“The fire department is fighting multiple fires at once,” the official said, adding: “The good news is they’re all one-story structures on fire, which the fire department deals with all day, every day.”
