🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — The Pentagon is reassessing its military presence in the Middle East and the cost of rebuilding U.S. bases damaged by Iranian attacks, with officials considering whether some installations should be restored or abandoned, according to Breaking Defense.

Officials are working with CENTCOM to determine which bases should be restored, while reassessing defenses against drones and cruise missiles.

Iranian strikes rendered the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar inoperable and damaged U.S. installations in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Naval Support Activity Bahrain remains unusable.

The Pentagon has yet to provide a comprehensive repair cost estimate and is coordinating with the Golden Dome program to prioritize base protection.

🇪🇺🇨🇦🇬🇧🇺🇦 EU to press Canada and UK for more Ukraine funding

As a reminder, the EU has approved a loan of €90 billion for Kyiv for the years 2026-2027. However, during the summit, Vladimir Zelensky requested additional funds of €70 billion.

The publication notes that, given the growing funding deficit for Ukraine and the uncertainty regarding support from the United States, Brussels is increasingly looking to allies outside the political bloc as sources of funding.

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.politico.eu/article/eu-to-press-canada-and-uk-for-more-ukraine-funding/

🌐 Government websites go dark as software flaw sparks security scramble

Government websites in Europe and elsewhere went offline on Wednesday after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in a widely used programming language sent ‌website operators scrambling to protect their systems.

Developers of the PHP programming language said Tuesday they had identified two critical vulnerabilities and urged users to update their sites as soon as a fix was released. They said around 1345 GMT on Wednesday that a new version fixing the vulnerabilities was live.

But with reports that hackers were exploiting the flaws to break into websites, government agencies in the Netherlands and Finland were among those that took sites offline ahead of ​the fix as a precaution.

PHP underpins large parts of the internet, raising concerns that a significant number of websites could be vulnerable to attack.

"PHP is everywhere. It quietly powers WordPress, ​Drupal, Joomla, and Magento sites, shared hosting platforms, control panels, and an awful lot of software that doesn't even advertise that it runs PHP under ⁠the hood," cybersecurity company Huntress said in a blog post.

Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare said that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its ​firewall rules as a stopgap measure.

"We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update," he ​said on X.

Wordfence, a security plugin that protects WordPress websites, said all WordPress sites run on a PHP-installed server. It warned that automatic updates would not apply the fix and advised site owners to find out who is responsible for updating PHP on their sites.

Cybersecurity agencies in Europe, Australia, Japan and Britain have urged PHP users to update immediately or take websites offline until patches can be applied. The Dutch cybersecurity agency itself went offline, saying ​it had done so as a precaution because of the vulnerabilities.

Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP 5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are ​vulnerable.

🔗 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/eu-agency-warns-websites-may-need-be-taken-offline-php-prepares-patches-2026-10-21/