Bangladesh Bank restores website after PHP security vulnerability

The Bangladesh Bank website was restored on Sunday morning, October 25, following a three-day shutdown intended to mitigate cyberattack risks. The precautionary measure was taken after two major security vulnerabilities were identified in the PHP programming language, which could allow hackers to execute unauthorized commands on servers remotely.

Bangladesh Bank spokesperson Arif Hossain Khan confirmed the website became operational at 8:00 am after a thorough risk assessment. While the central bank's site was offline since Thursday, other financial institutions including Agrani Bank, IFIC Bank, Standard Islami Bank, and SBAC Bank also temporarily disabled their websites during this period. Janata Bank and Bengal Commercial Bank also experienced outages due to similar security concerns.

Despite the website downtime, officials noted that internet and mobile banking transactions continued without disruption. The vulnerability in PHP is a global issue that has prompted precautionary measures in several other countries. The government’s Aspire to Innovate (a2i) project noted that approximately 36,500 websites under the National Portal Framework are not at direct risk as they do not use PHP.