Recent Drupal Security Updates

Drupal is all about security  

The Drupal community is unique in many ways, and the Drupal Security Team is an example of this. They provide documentation about writing secure code and keeping your site secure. They work with the drupal.org infrastructure team and the maintainers of contributed modules, to look into and resolve security issues that have been reported.

When a security issue is reported, the Drupal Security Team mobilizes to investigate, understand, and resolve it as soon as possible. They use a Coordinated Disclosure policy, which means that all issues are kept private until a patch can be created and released. Public announcements are only made when the issue has a solution and a secure version is available to everyone. This communication is sent out through all of the channels possible so that everyone is made aware of what they need to do to keep their sites safe and secure.

This means that everyone finds out about the patches, and therefore the vulnerabilities, at the same time. This includes people who want to keep their sites secure, as well as those who want to exploit vulnerabilities. Security updates become a matter of speed, and the development teams at Amazee Labs, along with our hosting partner amazee.io, are always ready to make sure patches are implemented as quickly as possible.

Recent Drupal Security Releases

On March 28th 2018, the Drupal Security Team released SA-CORE-2018-002. This patch was a critical security vulnerability that needed to be implemented on every Drupal site in the world as quickly as possible. At the time of the patch release there were no publically known exploits or attacks using the vulnerability, which was present on Drupal versions 6.x, 7.x & 8.x and was caused by inadequate input sanitization on Form API (FAPI) AJAX requests.

On April 25th, 2018 SA-CORE-2018-004 was released as a follow up patch. This release fixed a remote code execution (RCE) bug that would affect any site with Drupal versions 7.x or 8.x. The vulnerability was critical, and both issues resulted from problems with how Drupal handles a “#” character in URLs.

What are the dangers?

There are a number of different kinds of attacks that could take advantage of vulnerabilities fixed in the recent security updates. One kind of attack that is becoming more common is the installation of cryptocurrency mining software. These attacks are both subtle and resilient and use the CPU of the site server to generate cryptocurrency for the attacker.

Amazee Labs is keeping your sites safe

The Amazee Labs team takes these security releases seriously and works quickly to prepare for these updates. We inform our clients as soon as possible about the upcoming release and organize the maintenance and development teams to be ready to run the updates at the time of the release. During these “patch parties” our global teams work together to solve problems and secure all sites by leveraging everyone’s expertise all at once.

Implementing these measures takes development time not alloted in our usual maintenance budgets. We will always let you know when additional work is needed, and keep the communication channels open to address any concerns.

An additional layer of security is provided to our clients who host with our partner amazee.io. As soon as the security patch is released, the amazee.io team work to put an infrastructure level mitigation in place. This means that all Drupal sites that they host are immediately secured against initial attacks. You can read a detailed breakdown of how they accomplished this here.