Study Finds 70% of the Internet Was Built by Someone’s Nephew

BOZEMAN, Mont. — As governments scramble to patch a critical flaw in PHP, the programming language behind roughly 70% of the world’s websites, a study released Thursday found that nearly all of those sites were built by someone’s nephew over a long weekend between 2006 and 2013 and have not been touched since.

The Gallatin Valley Small Business Alliance surveyed 1,200 owners after federal officials urged anyone who couldn’t patch right away to take their sites offline. Of those, 81% said the site was “done by my sister’s boy,” 12% named “a guy from church,” and 7% believed it came with the building.

“He set it up over Thanksgiving in 2009. He was very good with computers,” said Carol Benning-Pfeiffer, 66, owner of Carol’s Custom Upholstery, whose homepage still has a visitor counter and a spinning gold sofa. “I called him last night. He’s 41 now, a podiatrist in Spokane. He said he’d have to look at it, which is what he said in 2009.”

“PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page, and nobody has been home since,” said alliance research director Wendell Uplink, 58, a retired county assessor. “Half the passwords were on an index card taped to a monitor that went to the dump in 2014. The rest are the nephew’s birthday, and nobody knows the nephew’s birthday.”

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted, “Please check if your publicly available websites use PHP,” which 74% of respondents said they would do as soon as someone told them what PHP was. Another 19% forwarded it to the nephew.

By Thursday morning, Benning-Pfeiffer had taken her site offline, the first change to it in 17 years. Three customers called to ask whether she was still in business, the most traffic the website had ever brought in.