Continuing to Run Drupal 7 Isn’t Making Your Website Insecure Contrary to Claims by Abbacus Technologies and Prodigitude

In June 2020, Drupal announced that the end of support for Drupal 7 was being delayed until November 28, 2022. In February of this year, it was delayed until November 1, 2023. It might get delayed further:

We will announce by July 2023 whether we will extend Drupal 7 community support an additional year. Factors that we will consider are community support, Drupal 7 usage, and active Drupal 7 maintainers. Current support is made possible thanks to the many Drupal 7 maintainers and companies that are paying to support Drupal 7.

Despite that, websites running Drupal 7 have recently been getting emails from spammers promoting hiring them to migrate Drupal 7 websites with misleading claims, including about the security of Drupal 7.

One of that we recently reviewed had a sender email address from the domain name drupalupdates.com, which redirects to the website of a company named TEN7. But clicking a link in the email instead took you to the website of Abbacus Technologies. The email starts out with this statement:

Upgrade your Drupal Site as Drupal will quit supporting lower versions

As we already mentioned, Drupal 7 continues to be supported for more than a year. Eventually all versions of Drupal will no longer be supported, so the argument that you should migrate from Drupal 7 because support will eventually end, would also be an argument for not using any version of Drupal (or any software for that matter)

The email goes on to say this:

Better security – Your store will be more secure as many security loop holes are being covered in this updates.

It is unclear what “security loop holes” refers to, as that isn’t security terminology, but Drupal 7 continues to receive security updates if there are vulnerabilities found. If they want to claim that Drupal 7 is insecure in comparison to Drupal 9, we would love to see what, if any, evidence they could present to back that up.

A second email that we recently reviewed came from a company named Prodigitude. They at least were partially honest about support not ending soon:

Drupal 7 will reach its end-of-life in November 2023 which will leave your website vulnerable to cyberattacks, amongst other dangers.

They though also claimed that migrating to the new version of Drupal would secure it:

With the migration, your website will have security measures in place to ensure your website isn’t in danger of malfunctioning or at risk of hacking.

There isn’t an ability to make a website impervious to hacking by migrating to the new version of Drupal. It could still get hacked even if Drupal is up to date, if say, an unfixed vulnerability is discovered by a hacker. There are other ways that a website can be hacked that can’t be prevented by the software running on the website. Among those, the underlying server could be breached.

Securing a Drupal 7 Website

If you do want to ensure that a Drupal 7 website is secure against threats in Drupal, you do need to promptly apply security updates. If you haven’t been doing that, we offer a subscription upgrade service, where it only costs $1 for the first month, as we are confident you will want to keep using the service.

While it isn’t necessary to migrate to Drupal 9 from 7 at this time, if you do want to do that, we offer a service for handling the migration.