Drupal Patches Highly Critical Vulnerability Exposing Websites to Hacking

Summary

Drupal has released patches for CVE-2026-9082, a highly critical vulnerability (CVSS 20/25) in its database query API that allows unauthenticated attackers to perform SQL injection, information disclosure, privilege escalation, and remote code execution on PostgreSQL-based sites. The flaw affects less than 5% of Drupal installations, but patches are available for versions 10.5.x, 10.6, 11.2, and 11.3. Exploitation in the wild has been confirmed as of May 21.

Full text

Drupal has patched a highly critical vulnerability that could allow threat actors to hack websites powered by the open source content management system (CMS). The developers of the CMS had alerted users prior to the patch’s release that an exploit might be created within hours or days of disclosure. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-9082 and rated ‘highly critical’ with a NIST CMSS score of 20 out of 25, affects an API designed to ensure that database queries are sanitized to prevent SQL injection attacks. “A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests, resulting in arbitrary SQL injection for sites using PostgreSQL databases,” Drupal explains. It warns that the flaw can be exploited without authentication to obtain information and in some cases for privilege escalation and remote code execution. Drupal powers hundreds of thousands of websites, but CVE-2026-9082 only affects sites that use PostgreSQL. Drupal developers believe less than 5% of websites are impacted.Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading. Patches are available for Drupal versions 11.3, 11.2, 10.6, and 10.5.x. The latest updates also address ‘important’ vulnerabilities in Symfony and Twig that affect Drupal. “Depending on your site configuration and contrib modules, you may be vulnerable to one or more of these upstream issues, so updating these dependencies is highly recommended whether the SQL Injection vulnerability affects you or not,” Drupal recommends. Vulnerabilities are regularly patched in Drupal, but few of them are severe, and there hasn’t been a ‘highly critical’ flaw in years. There haven’t been any reports of new Drupal flaws being exploited in the wild since 2019. In the years leading up to 2019, several vulnerabilities were exploited, including Drupalgeddon and Drupalgeddon2, which were used to hack many websites. UPDATE, May 22: Threat actors have started exploiting the vulnerability. *updated on May 21 with information that less than 5% of websites are affected Related: Microsoft Patches Exploited UnDefend and RedSun Defender Zero-Days Related: Exploitation of Critical NGINX Vulnerability Begins Related: Anthropic Silently Patches Claude Code Sandbox Bypass Written By Eduard Kovacs Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is senior managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher before starting a career in journalism in 2011. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering. Daily Briefing Newsletter Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing for the latest cybersecurity threats, trends, and expert insights. 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Indicators of Compromise

• cve — CVE-2026-9082

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