The Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC) has urged its regulated community, and others, to “take action” in the wake of an issue with the PHP programming language used by many websites and technology companies.
A critical cybersecurity flaw in the programming language has triggered widespread global internet disruption with thousands of websites being taken offline as a precautionary measure to deploy emergency security patches.
According to the National Cyber Security Centre PHP runs around 70% of the world’s websites; the secuirty issue could allow an attacker to trigger an out-of-memory (OOM) condition in PHP that results in memory corruption which under certain conditions could be epxloited to remote access websotes.
In the property market Rightmove, estate agency CRM providers Loop and Street, and Perfect Portal were amongst those reported to Today’s Conveyancer as being affected. Lloyds, Halifax, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Revolut are also said to have been affected
The CLC said practices should check whether their websites, servers or other products use PHP and ensure the security update has been applied. PHP have released a patch which fixes the issue.
