Remote Code Execution Flaws Patched in Drupal
21.10.2018 securityweek Vulnerebility
Developers of the Drupal content management system (CMS) have patched several vulnerabilities in the 7 and 8 branches, including serious flaws that can be exploited for remote code execution.

One of the security holes, rated “critical,” affects the Contextual Links module, which fails to properly validate requested contextual links. The vulnerability can allow remote code execution, but the attacker requires an account with the “access contextual links” permission for exploitation.

Another “critical” flaw is an injection issue in the DefaultMailSystem::mail() function. The problem is caused by the lack of sanitization of some variables for shell arguments when sending emails.

It’s worth noting that in Drupal’s case “critical” is the second highest security risk level, after “highly critical.” “Moderately critical” follows “critical” on the criticality scale.

The other three vulnerabilities addressed in the CMS this week have been assigned a “moderately critical” rating. This includes an access bypass issue related to content moderation, and two open redirect bugs.

One of the open redirect issues was publicly documented before the patches were released. Drupal developers also warned that the changes implemented in order to fix the access bypass weakness can have implications for backwards compatibility.

The vulnerabilities have been patched with the release of Drupal 7.60, 8.6.2 and 8.5.8.

It’s important that users install security updates as soon as possible. Drupal vulnerabilities have often been exploited by malicious hackers in the past years.

The recently disclosed flaws dubbed Drupalgeddon2 and Drupalgeddon3 have been exploited to deliver cryprocurrency miners, RATs, tech support scams and other threats. In recent attacks, threat actors exploited Drupalgeddon2 to install a backdoor on compromised servers.