Published : 24 Oct 2026, 09:56 PM
Updated : 24 Oct 2026, 09:56 PM
Bangladesh Bank has decided to keep their website offline as long as global risks persist.
The website has been inaccessible since the evening of Oct 22 as a precaution against potential cyberattacks.
The bank had planned to bring the site back online on Sunday, when it reopened after a five-day holiday.
Speaking to bdnews24.com on Saturday, Executive Director Arief Hossain Khan said: “We are prepared to bring it back online, but the risks remain [as of 8:30pm]. The website will not be reactivated as long as these global risks persist. Our IT team remains on high alert.”
The European Union’s cybersecurity agency has advised websites vulnerable to two critical flaws in PHP, a widely used programming language, to go offline temporarily if security patches cannot be installed immediately.
The PHP development team released urgent security updates on Wednesday to address the two vulnerabilities.
According to The Independent, several European government agencies also took their websites offline as a precaution after the flaws came to light.
Bangladesh Bank has similarly kept its website offline, while other financial sector regulators and institutions, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC), the Financial Institutions Division, the Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) and the Insurance Development and Regulatory Authority (IDRA), have kept their websites operational.
BGD e-GOV CIRT (Computer Incident Response Team), the state-run agency responsible for issuing cyberattack alerts, reported the discovery of the two critical PHP vulnerabilities on Thursday, naming them “PHP2Shell”.
The flaws could allow unauthorised individuals to breach the security of websites built using PHP, the agency warned.
