In an email interview, PHP maintainer Nikita Popov told us: "The first commit was found a couple hours after it was made, as part of routine post-commit ... as with source code version control ...

Unknown attackers compromised the official PHP Git server and ... The open-source server-side language is commonly used in web development. The code change was first noticed by contributors ...

A hacker compromised the server used to distribute the PHP programming language and added a backdoor to source ... website, would have allowed visitors with no authorization to execute code ...