Drupal announced plans to release a security update for Drupal 7.x, 8.3.x, 8.4.x, and 8.5.x on March 28, 2018, aimed at addressing a highly critical vulnerability.
The Drupal security team hasn’t provided information on the vulnerability and says it won’t release any details on it until the patch arrives. An advisory containing all the necessary information will be published on March 28.
Before that, however, the team advises customers to be prepared for the update’s release and to apply it immediately after it is published, given its high exploitation potential.
“The Drupal Security Team urges you to reserve time for core updates at that time because exploits might be developed within hours or days,” Drupal announced.
The highly popular content management system (CMS) powers over one million sites and is used by a large number of e-commerce businesses.
Due to the widespread use of Drupal, currently the second most used CMS after WordPress, the security update will be released for Drupal versions 8.3.x and 8.4.x as well, although they are no longer supported.
“While […] we don’t normally provide security releases for unsupported minor releases, given the potential severity of this issue, we are providing 8.3.x and 8.4.x releases that include the fix for sites which have not yet had a chance to update to 8.5.0,” Drupal says.
The Drupal security team urges customers to update to the appropriate release for their CMS version as soon as it is made available on March 28.
Thus, sites on 8.3.x should be updated to the upcoming 8.3.x iteration and then to the latest 8.5.x security release in the next month, while sites on 8.4.x should apply the next 8.4.x release and then upgrade to 8.5.x as well.
All sites on Drupal versions 7.x or 8.5.x should immediately apply the update when the advisory is released, using the normal update methods.
All of the appropriate version numbers for the impacted Drupal 8 branches will be listed in the upcoming advisory.
“Your site’s update report page will recommend the 8.5.x release even if you are on 8.3.x or 8.4.x, but temporarily updating to the provided backport for your site’s current version will ensure you can updat
e quickly without the possible side effects of a minor version update,” Drupal also notes.
Related: Several Vulnerabilities Patched in Drupal