PHP Cybersecurity Issue

In common with many other organisations, including the BBC and the States of Guernsey, we recently needed to conduct an urgent assessment of the potential impact of the Recent PHP Security Advisory. See also this BBC News Report on the issue.

Our main registry systems do not use PHP and remain unaffected - so no downtime has been needed; registrars continued to be able to register, modify and cancel domain names with us at all times, as normal.

Our public website at www.channelisles.net was using a content management system that has a dependence on PHP. As a precautionary measure we took it offline, temporarily, in the early evening of 21st October 2026. Our engineers were rapidly able to carry out an assessment, deploy an updated site without the use of PHP, and restore normal service at approximately 10 am, Island time on 22nd October.

About 3% of registered domains are registered directly with us.

During the 22nd and 23rd we carried out a complete re-install and re-engineering of the system we use for direct registrations (MY.CHANNELISLES.NET). That used a well-known system written in PHP. The re-install included installing the latest long-term-support release of the underlying operating system and the latest version of the software. Full service was restored on-schedule, mid-morning on the 24th October.

If you have any enquiries or concerns, please contact our Support Desk at the address you have been given, or in an emergency situation, call 07781 426912 and we will be pleased to assist.

For all other enquiries you may contact us via web-enquiries (at) channelisles.net