Scottish public bodies temporarily shut websites over global cyber risk

Several Scottish councils and NHS boards temporarily took their websites offline after critical security flaws were discovered in PHP, a programming language used by a large proportion of the internet.

Six health board websites were unavailable on Wednesday evening before being restored, while the City of Edinburgh Council was among the local authorities to suspend access during security work. The wider NHS Scotland website was also affected.

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre instructed organisations to install newly released updates immediately. Where this could not be done safely, website operators were advised to take affected systems offline until the vulnerability had been addressed.

The flaws could potentially allow an unauthorised attacker to run code remotely or access sensitive information. However, the shutdowns were precautionary and there has been no indication that Scottish NHS or council data was compromised. Organisations around the world took similar action as technical teams applied the security fixes.

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