Announcing when this patch is going to be released should leave a much shorter vulnerable window with the exploit out in the wild than releasing it immediately and hoping people update before they're a target.
I've seen a number of notifications on X and Bluesky of people taking their sites offline, though. Supposedly Cloudflare is providing all customers a WAF rule that will mitigate the exploits they've been able to see so far (though they mention, this is not full protection—patching is still required).
I think, given the (supposed) seriousness of this issue, it’s an adequate response. I suspect Cloudflare et al will have rules added to their managed WAFs within a few hours after release as well.
That said: it seems like the core issue is that they can’t release PHP publicly without revealing the exploit, wouldn’t it have made more sense to coordinate in the background with these organizations, and important distros, so that this could have been patched without revealing the exploit?
But they say it's a stopgap and still advise patching. It makes sense, since their tweet also says "are updating mitigations as new vectors show up" so it seems like there are many ways to exploit this, whatever it is.
The only significant thing lost of comments, but they have been getting more spammy over the years. Its actually better now too in many ways and I fixed various issues during the move.
Unfortunately my static HTML is pre-rendered by a PHP engine before being served.
It's a static web site generator, powered by php :)
In any case, memory-unsafe codebases will continue to be a significant danger. Be it in interpreters or anywhere else. Just like they have been for the past 20+ years.
Dark day for Drupal and Wordpress, heh
This is like a Health Ministry recommending leech therapy to its employees.
Anyway.
CCB is overtly a marketing organization, not an IT security one.
IIRC they don't even host their own website, The Chancellery of the Prime Minister does it for them.
That's reducing things too far. "What car manufacturer hasn't had car crashes?" All cars are equally safe?
There's a vast difference between different languages and CMSs and how likely it is for critical flaws to occur. PHP has a horrible track record and continues to surprise us negatively.
I just don't think it's the developer's responsibility.
Depending on the size of the team of course, but the work that developer's do comes from someone else. Empower me to make decisions and I'll make them, but don't blame me for the choices other people make if you won't empower me.
Once it's out it's likely to be an easy "disable this damnable feature nobody needs" as usual.
>Safely ahead in a digitally resilient Netherlands.
Things being offline seems like a daily occurrence recently. Is it a co-incidence? Is it AI? Are Russia/Iran doing an e-blitzkrieg?
If it's a combination of all three, surely nation states are going to unleash everything possible right now and do as much damage before the world adapts and becomes resilient?
If the latter, would be interesting to put an actual cost on all this downtime and whether it's actually making any impact, or is just noise/free training.
> Today, a remote code execution vulnerability was found in PHP, called php2shell. [...] Since explain xkcd is affected by this exploit, I have decided to take the wiki down until tomorrow.
So they need to give time for infra people in all different time zones to wake up, learn about the announcement, and plan how to patch it.
The intended course of action is 1. take down website a few hours before the fix drops 2. apply the fix 3. only make website public again after it has been fixed
Scheduled release gives the option to turn things off on a set schedule while applying patches.
e: turns out several people answered this. Whoops.
Europa.eu and all related subdomains were down very early CEST morning. They run Drupal.
WJW•48m ago
BlackRabbit1•46m ago
baaym•44m ago
WJW•37m ago
jacquesm•31m ago
piker•25m ago
[EDIT: I see I may have erroneously extended your criticism to sites other than NCSC, for which it does make sense. I would still defend using PHP.]