Vulnerabilities

Drupal Security Updates Patch Two Vulnerabilities

Security updates released on Wednesday for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 patch a couple of access bypass and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

Eduard Kovacs

June 16, 2016

Security updates released on Wednesday for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 patch a couple of access bypass and privilege escalation vulnerabilities.

According to a security advisory published by Drupal developers, version 7 is affected by a moderately critical flaw in the User module. The vulnerability allows a registered user to obtain all roles on a website by leveraging contributed or custom code that triggers a rebuild of the user profile form. An attacker could exploit this weakness to obtain administrative access to the targeted website.

“This issue is mitigated by the fact that it requires contributed or custom code that performs a form rebuild during submission of the user profile form,” Drupal noted.

The issue, reported by an individual who uses the online moniker “alfaguru,” has been addressed with the release of Drupal 7.44.

Drupal developer Nickolay Leshchev discovered that the “Views” module used in versions 7 and 8 is affected by a “less critical” access bypass vulnerability. The Views module allows website administrators and designers to create, manage and display lists of content.

The flaw allows users that don’t have the “View content count” permission to see information from the Statistics module. This security bug can only be exploited if the view is configured to show a “Content statistics” field (e.g. Total Views, Views Today, Last Visit).

Drupal 8 users can resolve the issue by updating to Drupal 8.1.3. In Drupal 7, users need to update the Views module to version 7.x-3.14.

Drupal 8 was made generally available in mid-November 2015. A few months before the official launch, the developers of the popular CMS invited hackers to find vulnerabilities in the new version and promised them bounties ranging between $50 and $1,000.

Vulnerabilities in Drupal can be highly valuable for malicious actors. Researchers reported last month that attackers had still been exploiting CVE-2014-3704 to hack websites more than 19 months after it was patched.

Written By Eduard Kovacs

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

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