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Elections B.C. website taken down amid global outages blamed on PHP programming language (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/britishcolumbia@lemmy.ca
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In a statement, an Elections B.C. spokesperson said the website was temporarily shut down to allow for system maintenance after a "global security vulnerability" was identified. It was restored as of 3:20 p.m. PT.

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[–] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Good for them! Any PHP-based service facing the Internet that isn’t patched in the next 12 hours or so will likely be taken over by bots by tomorrow. Mirai already has a php2shell module and is blasting across the Internet. PHP5 and PHP6 are vulnerable and have no patches.

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    [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 child)

    How can I independently verify that my hosting provider has updated their PHP services that are used to serve my web site?

    It's a fairly generic Softaculous/Cpanel based host.

    And, yes, I have sent an email request. Still waiting (and waiting) for a reply.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 weeks ago

    You can add a phpinfo file to check the version:

    That should give you the details to check the version running matches the patched versions. Just remove it when your done for maximum obfuscation.

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    • [–] 1 point 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    Yep, I updated my public facing nextcloud as soon as I could too.

    Ondrej's repository has a php 5.6 fix for ubuntu if you can't get any official backport yourself.

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