South Tucson website restored after global PHP flaw
South Tucson’s website was down for more than 24 hours after CivicPlus shut down services over a global PHP security flaw.
The City of South Tucson’s website was down for more than 24 hours after its provider, CivicPlus, shut down services Wednesday over a security flaw in PHP that also briefly knocked out Cochise County’s site.
The website was restored Thursday afternoon. CivicPlus said the shutdown was “a precaution due to a security vulnerability affecting PHP,” according to its status page. PHP is a coding language that runs behind many websites, handling things like logins and payments. The flaw could let attackers take control of those servers.
The problem was global. Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline Wednesday, according to Reuters, including those of the Dutch national cybersecurity agency and France’s Interior Ministry. PHP runs roughly 75% of websites whose programming language can be identified, according to the web technology tracker W3Techs.
The National Security Agency released an advisory Wednesday recommending critical code patches for vulnerabilities in the PHP scripting language.
“Because PHP is so widely used, these security flaws can create an environment ripe for exploitation,” the agency said.
The NSA said that PHP runs directly on web servers and can be added to other coding languages to improve websites.
The agency recommended that web developers “immediately conduct an inventory, where feasible, of hardware/software services reliant on now-vulnerable PHP versions,” and offered guidance on patching.
The vulnerabilities, nicknamed “PHP2Shell,” could allow attackers to take control of affected web servers without authorization or prior access. That could let them steal personal data, disrupt web services or even breach deeper into websites.
“These vulnerabilities are flaws in PHP itself, not in the hosted application or its configuration,” the NSA said. “Servers running affected PHP versions are exploitable.”
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Topacio "Topaz" Servellon
South Tucson City Manager Veronica Moreno told Tucson Spotlight Thursday morning that the city had been in communication with CivicPlus about the issue.
South Tucson was not the only Southern Arizona municipality affected by the service interruption.
An IT specialist for Cochise County said the county’s website was also down for a few hours but has been back up and running since Wednesday afternoon.
According to CivicPlus’s status history, the company took its municipal website services that use Community Development and Web Open software offline because of the PHP security vulnerabilities. The outage affected logins, payments, inspections, invoicing and reports.
CivicPlus restored the latest software version late Wednesday afternoon.
“We are continuing to monitor the system to support security and stability,” the company said.
Previous versions of the software remain offline.
“There is no evidence that customer data has been compromised,” CivicPlus said. “We will provide updates as information becomes available.”
CivicPlus reported “degraded performance” for municipal websites Thursday morning, but by Thursday afternoon, South Tucson's services had been restored.
Topacio “Topaz” Servellon is a reporter with Tucson Spotlight. Contact them at topacioserve@gmail.com.
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