At least 31 municipalities across Japan have suspended or scaled back their websites while they fix a serious vulnerability in PHP, the programming language many of those sites run on, as of October 30. The delays are concentrated in small local governments, where updating the software needed to patch PHP is taking time.
The Sankei Shimbun checked the websites of all 1,741 municipalities and found that, as of 9 p.m. on October 29, 8 cities, 17 towns and 6 villages could not be reached and displayed messages such as "under maintenance."
Officials in the smallest of those governments describe handling the work without in-house expertise. "We are not a large municipality, so we have few people with IT know-how," an official in Izena, a village in Okinawa Prefecture, said. "We are responding while the contractor teaches us."
Some municipalities cannot be reached at all, including Toyo in Kochi Prefecture. An official there said the site had worked normally until now but had grown old. "Rebuilding the website costs money and takes time," the official said.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said on October 21 that temporarily taking a site offline is also an effective option when applying the fix promptly is difficult. According to the top pages of municipal sites, at least 200 municipalities have been affected in some way.
Residents bear the cost
Municipal sites also carry disaster information, so a prolonged shutdown raises concern about the effect on services to residents. The gap is widest where IT staff are thinnest, and improving cybersecurity at that level of government is pressing.