Forewarned Is Forearmed: Avoid 4 Drupal Security Problems

inShare Drupal is one of the most popular web development platforms nowadays. It allows anybody to create his personal blog or a corporate website. Even the White House official site has been made with Drupal. We see the main advantage of this CMS in its ability to handle around 20 thousand requests per second. Since this is an open-source platform, the developers from all over the world can contribute into Drupal’s evolution and introduce their own plugins in it to make the development process easier. Though Drupal is a secure platform, some threats still may occur to the Drupal-based websites. Let us outline the main issues below. In cases when the page is not found, many servers display the details of the server version that is used and the modules which are loaded. At this time hackers can see into both the structure of a website directory and the modules. This configuration information may provide a person with the unauthorized access to server directory for unplanned purposes. There is also a problem of poor protection of sessions due to which a user can access some nodes of the application they do not own access rights for. This sometimes happen when another user logs in to the network where there is already an authentic user. In this case the session of the latter is hijacked. SSL on the page may help to prevent the intrusion. Another risky issue is that Drupal allows its users to do cross-site scripting, that is to involve HTML or JavaScript code into the web page. Since Drupal does not normally filter such inputs, a hacker can use this to his advantage and introduce the noxious code into the application. This can further cause the execution of the code at the server and corresponding modification of the page behavior after this web page sends this harmful data to the server. One more problematic issue is that for each request Drupal loads an enabled module into the code and creates a long thread. This can result in a performance problem for an application hosted on shared servers when there is more requests than the server can rapidly process. Since this CMS requires the local code and plugins to be implemented for introducing new functionalities, Drupal may not be fit for developers who are used to mix IDEs in order to use the best points. On the other hand, it is widely appreciated for its usability and vast capacities.