The PHP scare that knocked websites offline

On Wednesday you may have noticed a few websites went dark. Here’s what happened, in plain English.

A huge share of the world’s websites run on a behind-the-scenes programming language called PHP. You never see it, but it’s the engine that builds the page when you visit many sites. WordPress, the most popular way to build a business website, runs on it. So do lots of online stores, booking systems, and customer portals.

This week, the people who maintain PHP released an emergency fix for two serious flaws researchers nicknamed “PHP2Shell.” In the worst case, an attacker could take over a website’s server without needing a password. The flaws reach back many years, so a lot of older websites are affected.

Because the risk was so high, some organizations took their websites offline as a precaution until they could patch them. That included government sites in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium, plus some services connected to Wikipedia. Most were back up the same day.

The good news: as of Wednesday evening there were lots of break-in attempts but no confirmed break-ins. The fix is out. The advice for anyone who runs a website is simple. Update PHP, then restart the server’s PHP processes. A server that’s been updated but not restarted can still be exposed.

What it means for local businesses: if your website runs on WordPress or sits on a typical web hosting plan, ask whoever manages your site three questions this week. Is our site’s PHP updated? Was it restarted after the update? Are we on a version of PHP that still gets fixes? If nobody can answer, that’s your answer.

Tool of the week: TeraCopy

If you’ve ever tried to copy a big pile of files in Windows, like years of photos or a whole folder of business records to a new drive, you’ve probably seen it stall, crash partway through, or quit on one bad file. Then you get to guess what made it over and what didn’t.

TeraCopy is a free utility that does this job better. You can pause a big copy and resume it later. If a file has a problem, TeraCopy skips it, keeps going, and gives you a list of what failed at the end. It can also check that each copied file exactly matches the original, so you know the copy is good before you delete anything. If you’re moving a lot of data, it’s worth the two-minute install. TeraCopy: https://www.codesector.com/teracopy

Is your business covered? A free checklist

DarkHorse IT keeps a plain-English threat briefing for business owners at https://threats.darkhorseit.com. It covers the cyber threats that matter right now, like criminals using AI to break into websites, fake calendar invites that take over Microsoft 365 accounts, and bad ads showing up on trusted websites. Every claim links to its source.

The most useful part is the “Do you have every layer?” checklist. It walks through the protections every business should have, including a supported firewall, 24/7 monitoring on every computer, tested backups, a password manager, and email settings that stop scammers from sending mail as you. Go through it, tick off what you know is in place, and take anything you can’t tick to your IT provider.

Jeff Carney, DarkHorse IT, Moorhead