Access to Major Public Institutions Across Europe Blocked... Websites on High Alert for Hacking

[Financial News] After a critical security vulnerability was discovered in PHP, a programming language widely used across the internet, triggering a hacking alert, many European countries also began taking major websites offline as a precaution on the 21st (local time).
According to foreign media reports, several government agencies in the Netherlands took their public-facing websites offline following a recommendation from the National Cyber Security Centre. The websites of the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, the government portal Overheid.nl, the Royal Dutch Football Association, major political parties and major hospitals were taken offline.
In Finland, widespread access outages are also occurring as government public network services have been taken offline as a precaution.
KOMBIT, an IT company serving local governments in Denmark, also said it had suspended a number of services, including a communications platform for public schools.
In Belgium, national institutions such as the Foreign Ministry and Cybersecurity Centre, as well as local authorities, including the Flemish government and parliament, proactively took their websites offline. Access was also being blocked in the private sector, including on the school platform Smartschool and the websites of major media outlets, the Belgian English-language newspaper The Brussels Times reported.
The Brussels Times reported that notices posted on websites whose access had been suspended said services were unavailable due to system maintenance, without mentioning the PHP security issue.
The previous day, the European Union (EU) issued a security advisory warning that the discovery of a vulnerability in PHP had heightened concerns about hacking, and urging users to upgrade PHP as soon as its developers released a security patch.
EU cybersecurity authorities stressed that if applying the security patch was not feasible, the website in question should be considered for taking offline.

[email protected] Lee Seok-woo, International Affairs Correspondent Reporter