St Helena Resilience Forum advises any local individuals, businesses and organisations who have a website running outdated versions of PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), to update their websites immediately. A security patch is required to address a critical vulnerability discovered on Tuesday, 20 October 2026.

If a third-party provider manages your website, contact them immediately to apply this patch.

If this security update is not applied, malicious individuals could gain full control of the web server where a website is hosted, allowing them to steal or copy any information stored there, or take a website offline in its entirety.

For more detailed, technical, information refer to the below article published by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC):

Critical security issue affecting PHP | National Cyber Security Centre 

Note: PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely used server-side scripting language designed for web development. It runs on a web server to generate dynamic page content, interact with databases, and handle backend application logic before delivering the final HTML output to a user’s browser. PHP is also used in a range of other products. Only those using outdated versions of PHP in their websites may be affected.