TOKYO — Japan announced on Friday that it will establish a dedicated team to simulate cyberattacks using AI in order to identify weaknesses in its technology systems, as organizations worldwide scramble to contain the fallout from critical flaws in the PHP programming language, which underpins much of the internet.

Government and corporate websites around the world went offline this week after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in the widely used language triggered millions of hacking attempts, pushing website operators to rush to secure or temporarily shut down their systems. The surge pattern is familiar to security teams: once critical flaws are publicly disclosed, automated scanning and exploitation attempts typically follow as adversaries race to reach unpatched systems.

Underscoring the scale of the disruption, Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank said on Friday it was suspending its emergency alert system for mobile users. Customers will temporarily not receive early warnings for earthquakes, tsunami alerts, or disaster and evacuation information while the system undergoes maintenance to address a PHP vulnerability, the company said. The move carries particular weight in a country that sits along one of the world’s most seismically active regions and relies on mobile alerts as a core part of disaster response.

“An attack can succeed by getting through just one hole … for that reason it’s important we shift our mindset and think from the perspective of the attacker,” Japanese industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said on Friday. “Defenders also need to make use of AI and respond proactively, staying one step ahead.”

The emergency shutdowns this week — spanning banking, airline, rail, tax, and government services from Tokyo to Helsinki — marked one of the most dramatic stress tests of the decades-old programming tools that keep the web running. Companies including brokerage Nomura, lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, airline ANA, and East Japan Railway (JR East) temporarily suspended some internet services as part of emergency measures. Japan’s Ministry of Finance, National Tax Agency, and Meteorological Agency also took some online services offline.

On Friday, JR East said some group services had resumed, while others would be restored once confirmed safe. Nippon Paint said it had applied a security patch as a precaution and that its website was back online. The near-term focus for operators will be how quickly the remaining suspended services come back online and how widely the fixes released on Wednesday are adopted.

Eva Chen, CEO of cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, said attackers are likely targeting Japanese businesses for their thorough record-keeping, which AI has stripped of its former protection by language barrier. Japan, she added, has been too comfortable with existing infrastructure that it considered sufficiently safe.

Cybersecurity experts have noted that AI is helping attackers automate tasks ranging from scanning for software vulnerabilities to crafting phishing campaigns, making cybercrime faster, cheaper, and harder to detect. Japan’s new simulation team represents the defensive mirror of that trend, applying the same speed and scale to hunting for weaknesses before attackers can exploit them.

PHP — a computing language alongside HTML and Python that has anchored server-side web development since the mid-1990s and powers platforms including WordPress and Wikipedia — saw its developers release fixes on Wednesday for vulnerabilities that had lurked in the software for years until they were uncovered using AI. The developers urged users to “update immediately.”

— Reuters