Acquia Guide Outlines Drupal Security Risks and Safeguards

Website teams running Drupal sites face common application security risks, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, authentication bypass, remote code execution, and cross-site request forgery. A new Acquia article by Kevin Funk, senior technical marketing manager at Acquia, reviews those risks and outlines operational safeguards for Drupal deployments.

The guide frames Drupal security as a combination of community process, site maintenance, access control, and infrastructure protection. It points to Drupal’s dedicated security team, weekly security advisories, and Drupal Steward, a web application firewall coordinated with the Drupal Association to provide temporary protection between a security release and full site patching.

Acquia recommends keeping Drupal core and contributed projects up to date, maintaining regular backups, using HTTPS with SSL certificates, hardening HTTP security headers, validating user input, and applying least-privilege access controls. The guide also lists contributed projects, including Automated Logout, CAPTCHA, Content Access, Password Policy, Security Kit (SecKit), Session Limit, and Two-Factor Authentication, while noting broader hosting safeguards such as updated PHP and database software, secure file transfer, web application firewalls, DDoS mitigation, and bot management.