What is PHP actually?published at 2:54 p.m. BST
Liv McMahon
Technology journalist
PHP refers to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a back-end programming language that runs on a web server. It was developed in the early 1990s to help serve dynamic web pages, but it still powers many platforms today.
When you visit a website, PHP essentially helps deliver what appears on the page by retrieving and processing information from its databases.
The popular programming language is used across a wide range of online platforms, including WordPress, as well as Wikipedia and online stores.
According to cybersecurity firm Wiz, which helped uncover critical PHP vulnerabilities that emerged this week, PHP powers 70% of the world’s websites. And he said the flaws – now called “php2shell” – were inherent to the language itself, affecting many versions of it.
The PHP Foundation, the nonprofit organization that maintains the programming language, warned that this meant that, under the right conditions, an unauthenticated attacker would be able to execute code on servers running PHP.
He urged those running it to update now to prevent the vulnerability from being exploited on their platforms.
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