Developers of the PHP platform on Wednesday rolled out patches to fix the vulnerabilities that had been lurking in their software for years.
“All PHP users are strongly encouraged to update immediately,” the company said.
Authorities and security organisations around the world have echoed those warnings to website operators to secure their platforms.
The US National Security Agency told all organisations that use PHP to take their systems offline if they were unable to patch them immediately, adding that the flaw could provide a “direct path” to exploit a system’s database.
“These risks are serious enough to require immediate patching across United States Government departments and agencies,” the agency said.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre gave similar advice and told organisations to check for “backdoors installed by an attacker”.
Its counterparts in the EU, Singapore and Australia have also issued similar alerts.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged people to check if their publicly available websites ran on PHP.