Yesterday, Arcada’s web services based on the PHP programming language were shut down for just over an hour as a security precaution. The measure was taken after the university of applied sciences received information about a security vulnerability.
Information about a PHP security vulnerability was reported in national and international media yesterday (21 October). The nature of the vulnerability was not fully known until a fix was released. To prevent any potential exploitation of the vulnerability, Arcada, like many other higher education institutions and public-sector organisations, temporarily shut down all web services based on PHP.
In practice, this meant that all websites were unavailable for approximately one hour. In addition, users were unable to access certain systems that require Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication. As a result, services such as itslearning and Sisu were temporarily inaccessible.
Shortly after 5:00 p.m., when the security fix became available, Arcada was able to restart its websites and, soon afterward, the majority of its other web services. All services are now functioning normally.