Denmark’s preparedness minister urged more investment in digital infrastructure after a PHP flaw prompted municipal service closures, telling Reuters that reliance on connected systems leaves public services exposed to cyber threats.
Resilience and Preparedness Minister Lisbeth Bech-Nielsen also called for a review of how much critical equipment is connected to the internet, Reuters reported Oct. 23. She said disruptions could weaken confidence in public institutions. The recommendations followed a temporary interruption to common digital services used by Danish municipalities.
Denmark’s municipal IT operator, KOMBIT, said it learned of a potential vulnerability on Oct. 21 and temporarily closed Aula, parts of shared library infrastructure, KLIK and the Digitalization Catalogue. It said the precaution was intended to protect municipal data and system security, though the shutdowns inconvenienced municipalities and users.
KOMBIT said services were updated and gradually restored, with Aula back to normal operation later on Oct. 21. The organization reported no indication the vulnerability had been exploited in the affected services.
An Oct. 21 advisory from the PHP development team identified CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 as critical flaws that could let an attacker run code on a server remotely without logging in. The advisory listed fixes in PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. It says the flaws affect PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed; it rated mod_php as the highest-risk configuration.
EconoTimes has previously reported on PHP flaws that prompted website shutdowns in the Netherlands.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an Oct. 22 post that attempts seen across the company’s network had reached the millions. He described thousands of attempts in the 10 hours before public disclosure, followed by tens of thousands during the next 45 minutes and hundreds of thousands within two hours. The figures count attempts across Cloudflare’s network, not confirmed successful breaches.
