Australian Government Websites Offline Due to Critical Security Flaw

Several prominent Australian government websites, including those of the cyber defense agency and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, were temporarily taken offline due to the discovery of critical security vulnerabilities. The outages occurred in the early hours of Thursday and affected hundreds of other websites internationally.

The vulnerabilities were identified in PHP, a widely used scripting language that powers more than two-thirds of the world's websites and is integral to website and app development. Dimitrios Salampasis, from Swinburne Business School, described the flaw as serious, noting its potential to expose sensitive information and enable hackers to gain control of affected systems.