Several University of Oxford websites went down during a global web outage that raises questions for cybersecurity in the AI age.A University of Oxford spokesperson said “as a precautionary measure, and in line with national cyber security advice, a number of University websites were temporarily taken offline.” This included the main University of Oxford website, which was down on Wednesday 21st October.Oxford City Council, Merton College intranet, and the Oxford Historians Hub, alongside other University of Oxford websites on the Mosaic platform, also went down, as a result of a serious vulnerability found in a computer language used to build many websites.The vulnerability was found in the programming language Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), an open-source programming language hosted on a web server, which serves to turn code and data into readable websites. The issue was discovered by cyber-security firms Calif and Wiz, tasked with using advanced AI tools to find flaws in website security.After the vulnerability was discovered, PHP released a patch, and any websites unable to patch immediately were instructed to shut down.PHP sits beneath many websites, and often can be difficult to find where it is operating, leading many websites in Oxford and beyond to shut down, including briefly the Metropolitan Police, other local councils, and even Dutch government agencies.Major website outages are nothing new, in 2024, a Windows outage grounded flights and rail services across Europe, but the events of Wednesday were different. Rather than being caused by a bug or a cyber attack, many websites were shut down deliberately, as after the PHP vulnerability was discovered, it would have been unsafe to leave them up until they were patched.The outage revealed just how vulnerable much of the internet is to these small tools, programmes and protocols like PHP that many use every day without ever knowing. All University of Oxford websites affected by the outage are now back online. Liked this article? Why not share it?Related
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