UK tells public to keep three days of emergency supplies at home

The British government advised the public on Friday to keep three days of emergency supplies at home, a message it said had been driven home by this week’s PHP software flaw and by a record-setting summer of heat, drought and wildfires, Dawn reported, citing Reuters.

The government said the internet outage showed the importance of its newly launched “Be Ready” campaign, which tells households to keep three days of bottled water and non-perishable food in the house.

The new wildfire plan

Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who hosted a meeting on the response to wildfires, said that in the past Britain had been “on the back foot” in responding to emergencies and needed to be more proactive. The government announced a new wildfire response plan that includes deploying military aircraft.

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said cyber incidents like the PHP outage would become more common because artificial intelligence makes it easier to find ways around traditional defences. He also pointed to risks from hostile states, organised criminals and climate change. Britain faced a greater level of threat “than we have certainly for most, if not all, of my lifetime”, he said on the BBC’s “Question Time” programme, broadcast overnight.

The British advice is similar to that issued last year by the European Commission, which told EU citizens to keep a 72-hour emergency kit containing food, water, cash and power banks.

What the PHP incident was

Governments and businesses around the world rushed to secure systems running the PHP programming language after flaws were disclosed on Wednesday. Some services were forced offline and millions of hacking attempts followed, in one of the most significant cybersecurity incidents in recent years, Reuters said.

The flaws had been lurking in the software for years and were found using artificial intelligence, the cybersecurity firm Wiz said. PHP is free, open-source software maintained by volunteers, and it runs roughly 75 per cent of websites whose programming language can be identified, according to the web tracker W3Techs. It is built into WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento sites, which meant a critical vulnerability could have large knock-on effects.

Developers released urgent fixes and urged all users to update immediately. Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, Australia, Japan and Britain told PHP users to update or take their sites offline until patches could be applied. Experts warned of a race to exploit the flaws, with AI tools able to reverse-engineer the bug easily once a fix is public, and said small websites on shared hosting could stay exposed longest.

The disruption was widespread:

• Netherlands: the national cybersecurity centre went offline as a precaution, as did the Port of Rotterdam, the government portal Overheid.nl, the football association KNVB, the websites of the five largest political parties and several hospital sites.
• Finland: the state IT provider Valtori took government public network services offline “as a precautionary measure”.
• France: the interior ministry put all its websites into preventive maintenance.
• Denmark: the municipal IT company Kombit shut down several services, including the national school communication platform.

Read our earlier report on the PHP flaw and government websites going offline.

Why it matters

The British government is now tying a software flaw, wildfires and wider security threats into a single message that households should be ready to cope on their own for three days. It shows how governments are treating failures of digital systems as emergencies on a par with extreme weather. The test is whether the public follows the advice, and whether the new wildfire plan with military aircraft is in place before the next fire season.

This article draws on reporting by Dawn and Reuters.