South Africa presidency takes website offline amid global PHP exploit wave

The South African presidency's website went offline as a precaution two days after PHP released emergency fixes for two critical flaws that are already being exploited. Cloudflare reported millions of exploit attempts, and Cert-EU advised unpatched organisations to take sites offline.

• The presidency.gov.za site runs Drupal on PHP and its server stopped accepting connections
• PHP shipped the fixes on 21 October; both flaws allow unauthenticated remote code execution
• Of 17 South African government sites disclosing PHP versions, 12 run outdated builds
• Cloudflare saw millions of exploit attempts within hours of disclosure