Joomla 3 Doesn’t Contain Unfixed Critical Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Last week, the developers of Joomla released fixes for a number of vulnerabilities that have existed in the software. As is often the case, journalists (or at least people claiming to be journalists) and security researchers made overstated claims about those. Those claims included that the vulnerabilities were critical in nature and that one of them leads to remote code execution (RCE). Neither of those things is true.

With the claim of a RCE vulnerability, which would be serious, the reality is that this involved a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that Joomla rated as of moderate severity. That is a type of vulnerability that causes malicious JavaScript code to be output if access a specially crafted URL. And is a type of vulnerability that you don’t see exploit attempts on any large-scale basis. It isn’t a big concern, which might explain why you have journalists and security researchers often hyping up the worst-case scenario with it and not clearly noting the lack of real risk.

That vulnerability also actually involves an issue with PHP, which has been addressed, but only in supported versions of PHP. Joomla’s update addresses it for those running unsupported versions of PHP.

This vulnerability and the others being fixed exist in Joomla 3. Support for Joomla 3 ended in August of last year, meaning that there isn’t generally available official update for those running Joomla 3. There are several options for getting security fixes for it, but you would be better off upgrading to a supported version as soon as possible. That is something that we can help you with.

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