Finland shuts down public websites over security flaws

Finland on Wednesday took government websites offline following two critical security vulnerabilities detected in PHP software.

The Government ICT Centre (Valtori) said that the websites were shut down as a precaution.

The shutdowns started at 12:45 p.m. to avoid potential cyber- attacks, said the authorities.

“Websites of the Government and several ministries have experienced service disruptions. Some content may not load normally. The issue is being investigated. We apologize for the disruption,” said the government in its website.

Finnish Transport and Communications Agency -Traficom in a press release issued in the evening said that some of Traficom’s online services are temporarily unavailable.

“The websites have been taken offline as a precautionary measure due to critical security vulnerabilities identified in the online services,” said the press release, adding, “we are working to restore the services as soon as possible.”

Websites of different authorities including City Corporation also remained unavailable till late Wednesday night.

“The City of Vantaa’s website vantaa.fi is unfortunately currently not available. On this page you will find important contact information,” said the City of Vantaa on its website.

Websites across the world went dark after the serious vulnerability found in a computer language used to build much of the world wide web, international and local media reported.

In addition to Finnish government, the governments of Belgian, The Netherlands, France and Germany also took down the public websites temporarily as they scrambled to patch the critical weakness in PHP, a language used by almost 70% of websites.