Nearly 17,500 public institutions have been notified about the PHP2Shell cyber vulnerability, which may enable attacks and data theft

The National Directorate for Cybersecurity (DNSC) notified 17,416 public entities in Romania about the PHP2Shell vulnerability, which affects applications developed in PHP and could allow remote code execution without authentication. The institutions concerned include schools, hospitals, town halls, county councils, state-owned companies and public authorities.

The alert was made public on October 21, following the identification of security issues worldwide. The DNSC warns that failure to apply updates could lead to unauthorized access to databases, the theft of sensitive information, website compromise and account takeover. PHP is used by approximately 70% of websites worldwide.

The recommended measures were applied to the platforms managed by the General Secretariat of the Government, and most servers are running updated PHP versions. Some websites were still being updated and were temporarily protected through additional measures.

In this context, the websites of the Romanian Police and county inspectorates were temporarily unavailable for maintenance and security updates. Several local institutions announced that they had completed the updates, did not use PHP platforms or were monitoring their systems.