The PHP code at the centre of critical global cyber-security website flaws across the world was visible on more than 40% of the UK council websites surveyed last week.
Organisations' websites across the world were taken down, including those of several UK councils, when two critical vulnerabilities in the open source programming language were highlighted.
UK councils including Edinburgh City Council and Oxford City Council were taken offline, with others reporting errors or unavailability. Error messages appeared on the Bristol, Lambeth and Barnet local authority sites.
Analysis by Huro Data said that of the 379 websites it reviewed late last week, 155 (41%) showed PHP.
PHP is a programming language that runs on a webserver and is maintained by a non-profit called the PHP Foundation. The Foundation rolled out patches last week to fix the vulnerabilities.
The survey said local government was the second worst out of seven sectors it examined in terms of the how much PHP was visible.
Only four of the local government websites surveyed said which version of PHP was being used on their platforms. In 40 cases the survey could not tell whether the flaw had been patched, because the version of PHP was hidden and could not be read.
Edinburgh City Council said in a statement that it had made the decision to temporarily suspend online services ‘for maintenance' last Wednesday while it sought assurance from its service provider. It said the supplier had ‘worked quickly to fix the problem' and was able to restore service shortly after 11pm that night.
In Scotland, Argyll and Bute, East Lothian, Highland and Midlothian councils were among other Scottish councils reported to have taken websites offline.
