Security

Drupal emergency updates fix critical arbitrary PHP code execution

Drupal has released emergency security updates to fix a critical flaw with known exploits that could allow for arbitrary PHP code execution.

Drupal has released emergency security updates to address a critical vulnerability with known exploits that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary PHP code execution on some CMS versions.

The Drupal project uses the PEAR Archive_Tar library that was recently updated to address the CVE-2020-28948 and CVE-2020-28949.

As a consequence, multiple vulnerabilities impact Drupal installs when they are configured to allow .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, or .tlz file uploads and processes them.

“Drupal has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Drupal 7, 8.8 and earlier, 8.9, and 9.0. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.” reads the advisory published by CISA.

“The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) encourages users and administrators to review Drupal Advisory SA-CORE-2020-013 and apply the necessary updates.”

“According to the regular security release window schedule, November 25th would not typically be a core security window,” reads the security advisory published by Drupal.

“However, this release is necessary because there are known exploits for one of core’s dependencies and some configurations of Drupal are vulnerable.”

Drupal released the following updates to address the issues:

“Versions of Drupal 8 prior to 8.8.x are end-of-life and do not receive security coverage,” Drupal’s security team added.

Drupal also recommends to mitigate this issue by preventing untrusted users from uploading .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, or .tlz files.

The number of vulnerable Drupal installs is approximatively over 940,000 out of a total of 1,120,94.

Last week, the Drupal development team has released security updates to fix a remote code execution vulnerability related caused by the failure to properly sanitize the names of uploaded files.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-13671, has been classified as critical according to the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System.

The flaw could be exploited by an attacker by uploading files with certain types of extensions (phar, php, pl, py, cgi, html, htm, phtml, js, and asp) to the server to achieve remote code execution.

[adrotate banner=”9″][adrotate banner=”12″]

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, PHP code execution)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

Recent Posts

CISA pushes Federal agencies to retire end-of-support edge devices

CISA ordered U.S. federal agencies to improve management of edge network devices and replace unsupported…

1 hour ago

Record-breaking 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack hits in November 2025, stopped by Cloudflare

AISURU/Kimwolf botnet hit a record 31.4 Tbps DDoS attack lasting 35 seconds in Nov 2025,…

21 hours ago

Nearly 5 Million Web Servers Found Exposing Git Metadata – Study Reveals Widespread Risk of Code and Credential Leaks

A study found nearly 5 million servers exposing Git metadata, with 250,000 leaking deployment credentials…

1 day ago

U.S. CISA adds SmarterTools SmarterMail and React Native Community CLI flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog<gwmw style="display:none;"></gwmw>

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds SmarterTools SmarterMail and React Native Community CLI…

1 day ago

Hacker claims theft of data from 700,000 Substack users; Company confirms breach

Substack confirmed a data breach after a hacker leaked data from nearly 700,000 users, including…

2 days ago

Pro-Russian group Noname057(16) launched DDoS attacks on Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics

Italy stopped Russian-linked cyberattacks targeting Foreign Ministry offices and Winter Olympics websites and hotels, Foreign…

2 days ago

This website uses cookies.