ColdFusion Muse

Using CDN for Entire Website and Country Blocking - Part 1

CF Webtools has been asked numerous times to block an entire country or countries by many clients. The issue is that there's a lot of hacker activity from certain identified countries and the client(s) does not do any business with those countries. Typically it's entire server hacking attempts, but more recently it's to use the client's shopping cart to "test" stolen credit cards. This is a very serious problem and as such clients are asking us to help them prevent this from happening. One potential solution is to block the IP addresses that these attacks are coming from. I refer to this as the Whack-A-Mole method because it's just like that arcade game. As soon as you block one IP they switch to another IP address.

We need a better solution. I looked into what we could do and how reasonable and feasible the various options are in terms of technology and cost. In this article I'm writing about using CloudFlare CDN to block entire countries.

CloudFlare
I was not familiar with CloudFlare other than it's a CDN. They do offer advanced services for a price. There is a free tier that has CDN capability and limited Firewall features. The firewall features include the ability to setup 5 firewall rules.

To test the features and capabilities of CloudFlare I created a free account for myself and setup my blog to use CloudFlare. My blogs uptime is not critical like the client's business is and it gets real traffic thus it can be used to test various features.

Using the free firewall features I can block multiple countries in a single firewall rule. The rules allow for chaining filters with AND OR statements. See the example below.

I don't know yet if there is a limit to the number of conditions I can add to a single rule. However, at the moment it seems to be sufficient.

The negative side effect that I can see so far is that all the IP addresses that get logged on the origin web server are from CloudFlare. This defeats many clients needs/desires to have a valid IP address of their valid customers. Cloudflare does offer the option to pass through the original HTTP headers, but that is under their top Enterprise plan. They do not provide a cost for this. You need to request an estimate.

CloudFlare does pass through custom headers that has the original IP and other custom headers. However, these are not standard and web servers need to be configured to first read the custom header fields and then the application code needs to be updated to use the custom headers fields. It's far easier to do this in Apache than it is in IIS. IIS does not allow this to be done at a global level meaning each IIS site must be configured for the custom headers. Additionally, you may need to custom code the web application to read X-Forwarded-For no matter which web server you are using.

Another issue is that CloudFlare requires you move your DNS to them. Depending on the client, gaining access to their DNS and registrar can be challenging.

Part 2 will cover using AWS CloudFront to achieve the same results.

CF Webtools is here to fill your needs and solve your problems. If you have a perplexing issue with ColdFusion servers, code, connections, or if you need help upgrading your VM or patching your server (or anything else) our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to operations @ cfwebtools.com.

ColdFusion Exploit in the Wild

On September 11th of 2018 Adobe released a critical security patch to patch a very dangerous flaw (CVE-2018-15961) that could allow an attacker to upload a file that can be used to exploit and take control of the server. Adobe updated their security note to alert everyone that there are active exploits in the wild.

"UPDATE: As of September 28, Adobe is aware of a report that CVE-2018-15961 is being actively exploited in the wild. The updates for ColdFusion 2018 and ColdFusion 2016 announced in this bulletin have been elevated to Priority 1. Adobe recommends customers update to the latest version as soon as possible." - Adobe

Today it is being reported by multiple news outlets including ZDNet that the exploit is in the wild and being used by a nation-state cyber-espionage group.

"A nation-state cyber-espionage group is actively hacking into Adobe ColdFusion servers and planting backdoors for future operations, Volexity researchers have told ZDNet. The attacks have been taking place since late September and have targeted ColdFusion servers that were not updated with security patches that Adobe released two weeks before, on September 11." - ZDNet

This is one more friendly reminder to make sure your ColdFusion servers are patched! Either patch them yourself, have your hosting provider patch them or if they are not familiar or knowledgeable with ColdFusion contact us at CF Webtools to patch your servers. Our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to "operations at cfwebtools.com".

ColdFusion Debugging on Production

Today's short note is brought to you by "Don't Do That On Production!" At CF Webtools often times we get called in to help troubleshoot servers that are failing to perform well. We often hear the same sort of symptoms that goes like this. The server has been running fine for months then suddenly for no reason it's slow, CPU usage is high, and it hangs or crashes multiple times per day. This always prompts us to ask the same question. "What was changed just before these symptoms started?" And the answer is usually "Nothing was changed (as far as they knew)". In all reality the person we're talking to may not the be only person with access to make changes to the server. Or they may not in fact have access at all and they are relying on information provided to them by an IT team member. We take notes, assume nothing, and question everything (on the server).

We had this scenario play out a few times in the past few weeks with three servers from three different companies. The reason I'm writing this note is the same problem occurred on each server. The short answer is someone enabled ColdFusion Debugging on the production server. ColdFusion is a very powerful rapid development platform, but it has a few gotchas if you are not careful. Such as enabling debugging on a production server. Debugging output provides a massive amount of information and for obvious security reasons we never want this enabled on a production server. Yes, I know you can restrict debugging output to a certain IP address, but that does not prevent the debugging output from being generated. It's just not displayed. The generation of debugging output takes more CPU power and at times more JVM memory. On a low load web application you may not notice a difference. However, on a high load, high traffic production web application the extra resources needed to generate the debugging output may in fact cause all those symptoms described above.

In each of the cases we saw these past few weeks, we were reviewing the servers settings, looking at the results of Fusion Reactor, and reviewing ColdFusion settings. On the first server we almost missed the fact that debugging was enabled. By the time we were troubleshooting the third server with similar symptoms we were checking to see if debugging was enabled before we did anything else. Disabling debugging resolved the bulk of the performance issues. We then used this time to review each server and offered additional performance tuning recommendations based on each servers resources and application needs.

This falls into the category of "Don't Do That On Production!" Please leave debugging to your development and staging servers.

CF Webtools is here to fill your needs and solve your problems. If you have a perplexing issue with ColdFusion servers, code, connections, or if you need help upgrading your VM or patching your server (or anything else) our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to operations @ cfwebtools.com.

USPS Shipping API Ending TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.0 Support, is your ColdFusion Server Ready?

At CF Webtools we recently went through a round of server upgrades to handle the Authorize.net ending support for older TLS versions. Now USPS, United State Postal Service, is doing the same thing with their Shipping APIs. This is going to be happening for all API's and most likely all this year as PCI requirements for ending support for TLS 1.1 and older at the end of June 2018. This is according to the PCI Security Standards Council.

USPS will be turning off support for TLS 1.1 and older for testing. In advance of the changes to production, TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 support will be discontinued in the lower Web Tools environments and available for testing on 5/22/18: https://stg-secure.shippingapis.com/shippingapi.dll): 06/11/18.

This message explains some security improvements planned for our services. Effective 06/22/18, Web Tools will discontinue support of Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.0 and 1.1 for securing connections to our HTTPS APIs through the following URL: https://stg-secure.shippingapis.com/shippingapi.dll. This includes, but is not limited to, all shipping label and package pickup APIs. After this change, integrations leveraging TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 will fail when attempting to access the APIs.

You are receiving this message because the Web Tools UserID associated with your email address has made HTTPS requests over the past year. It is possible that no changes are necessary to retain Web Tools services and benefit from the improvements. Please review the entire message carefully and share with your web developer, software vendor, or IT service provider to determine if your use of the Web Tools APIs will be affected. If you have already updated your security certificates please disregard this message. If you are not sure if any changes are necessary, please ask your IT service provider.

In advance of the changes to production, TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 support will be discontinued in the lower Web Tools environments and available for testing on 5/22/18: https://stg-secure.shippingapis.com/shippingapi.dll): 06/11/18.

Further background: Security research published in recent years demonstrated that TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 contained weaknesses that limited its ability to protect and secure communications. These weaknesses have been addressed in the TLS 1.2 version. Major browser software vendors have been supporting TLS 1.2 for some time. Consistent with our priority to protect USPS Web Tools customers, Web Tools will only support versions of the more modern TLS 1.2 as of the effective date noted above.

Contact us at WebTools@usps.gov with any questions or concerns.

This means that if you are using older methods to make calls to USPS that are not capable of making TLS 1.2 connections then you will NOT be able to process Shipping API transactions.

This affects ALL ColdFusion versions 9.0.2 and older! This also affects ColdFusion 10 Update 17 and older. If your server is running any of these older versions of ColdFusion and your server is processing Shipping API transactions with USPS then this advisory applies to your server.

Mitigation Getting compliant depends on age of your server operating system. There are three main ways to get your server to handle TLS 1.2.

1. If you're running on Windows Server 2008 Standard (not R2) or older then the only solution is to migrate to a newer server. This can be challenging and time consuming. It's best to start planning now if a plan isn't already in place and being acted upon.
2. If your server is running ColdFusion 10 and newer on Windows 2008 or newer then the solution is most likely very simple. In most cases you'll need to install the ColdFusion patches and upgrade to Java 1.8.0_nn.
3. There is a solution for the in between systems running ColdFusion 9 and older on Windows 2008 R2. This does require using a third party extension to ColdFusion and some refactoring of your code to call the API.
4. There are sure to be outlier cases that will require either migration or patching depending on the exact combination of operating system, ColdFusion version and Java version.

CF Webtools has been successfully mitigating this issue for clients servers for the past couple years and we are very experienced in resolving these security related issues. In a previous blog post I tested which TLS levels were supported by various ColdFusion versions on various Java versions and produced an easy to read chart.

If your ColdFusion server is affected by this or if you do not know if your ColdFusion server is affected by this then please contact us (much) sooner than later. Our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to operations at cfwebtools.com.

NEWSFLASH! Adobe Released the New ColdFusion 2018 Public Beta!

Adobe has announced the Public Beta of Adobe ColdFusion 2018 is now available. This release brings an all new Performance Monitoring Toolset that is available with both the Standard and Enterprise versions (So I've been told). There's plenty of language improvements and updates and a new Public Beta of ColdFusion Builder 2018. Hurry up while supplies last!

There a large number of changes including an all new ColdFusion Administrator. Here's a partial list of new things according to Adobe:

1. ColdFusion (2018 release) has a new User Interface. The new interface is based on a tiled interface. We have also enriched the search experience on the Administrator portal.
2. We have removed Server Monitor. We have introduced a tool called Performance Monitoring Toolset, which is more intuitive, includes more features, and provides better visibility of your application's performance.
3. We have made significant improvements to the core language features. Here is a brief list of the changes:
   1. Introduced NULL support
   2. Introduced closures in tags
   3. Introduced Asynchronous programming using Future
   4. Enhanced Object-Oriented Programming with the following:
      1. Abstract components and methods
      2. Final component, method, and variable
      3. Default functions in interfaces
      4. Covariance
   5. Semi-colons are now optional in a cfscript code
   6. Introduced named parameters in functions
   7. Introduced slicing in arrays
   8. New operator support using name-spaces for java, webservices, dotnet com, corba, and cfc
   9. Introduced support for typed arrays
   10. Introduced string literals and support for numeric member functions
   11. Introduced negative indices support for arrays
   12. New functions- ArrayFirst, Arraylast, QueryDeleteColumn, and QueryDeleteRow
4. Enhanced CLI and introduced REPL.
5. Introduced REST Playground application for testing your REST APIs.
6. Added support for REST PATCH verb.
7. Filter fields from JSON request.
8. Enhance performance through Caching with the newly added engines:
   1. Memcached
   2. JCS
   3. Redis
   4. Using a custom cache plugin
9. New Admin APIs to support the caching engines
10. Hibernate upgraded to ver 5.2
11. New configuration settings in wsconfig tool
12. Updates to ColdFusion Builder.

This is a huge update! Get it while it's hot!

ColdFusion Security updates for ColdFusion 2016 and ColdFusion 11

Adobe released important security updates and big fixes today, update 6 and update 14 for ColdFusion 2016 and ColdFusion 11 respectively.

These updates resolve an important insecure library loading vulnerability (CVE-2018-4938), an important cross-site scripting vulnerability that could lead to code injection (CVE-2018-4940) and an important cross-site scripting vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure (CVE-2018-4941). These updates also include a mitigation for a critical unsafe Java deserialization vulnerability (CVE-2018-4939) and a mitigation for a critical unsafe XML parsing vulnerability (CVE-2018-4942).

There is a bug of great importance to many that has finally been fixed. I've blogged about this before and I was able to create a work around to resolve this issue until it was fixed by Adobe. The SFTP/FTPS bug would not allow connections to secure FTP servers that utilized newer SSL protocols. When using CFFTP to connect to some S-FTP server, during connection, you can see an error message. This has been a growing issue as more and more companies replace plain text FTP servers with SFTP or FTPS servers that utilize stronger protocols.

For ColdFusion 2016 this update upgrades Tomcat to version 8.5.28 and OpenSSL to version 1.0.2n.

For ColdFusion 11 this update upgrades Tomcat to version 7.0.85 and OpenSSL to version 1.0.2n.

The security updates referenced in the above Tech Notes require JDK 8u121 or higher (for ColdFusion 2016) and JDK 7u131 or JDK 8u121 (for ColdFusion 11).

This is one more friendly reminder to make sure your ColdFusion servers are patched! Either patch them yourself, have your hosting provider patch them or if they are not familiar or knowledgeable with ColdFusion contact us at CF Webtools to patch your servers. Our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to operations at cfwebtools.com.

*Note: ColdFusion 11 when it was first released came with a version of Java 1.7.0_nn. Adobe later re-released ColdFusion 11 with Java 1.8.0_25. If you have ColdFusion 11 still running on Java 1.7 I highly recommend that Java be upgraded to Java 1.8. Oracle is no longer supporting Java 1.7 and 1.7 is long past it's end of life. Even though the Adobe instructions for this current security update states that you can run Java 1.7.0_131, I highly recommend upgrading to Java 1.8. Personally I will not install Java 1.7 on a clients servers and sign off on it being 'secure'.

ColdFusion SFTP and FTPS Secure Connection Failure

I have seen a lot more people asking questions about making SFTP or FTPS secure connections from ColdFusion using the <CFFTP> tag. They are trying to figure out why they cannot make a connection. Often the error is "Algorithm negotiation fail" or "Connection Error". People are posting their questions on many support forums including Adobes forums and their new ColdFusion Community Portal. This is a problem people are experiencing in ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion 11.

In the last few years we've seen a huge shift in SSL/TLS security including the removal of older less secure protocols and forcing secure connections to use the newer stronger protocols with stronger TLS certificates and stronger encryption cyphers. As such older systems need to be upgraded to handle the newer security protocols. More recently plain old unsecure FTP portals have been the focus of change to SFTP or FTPS.

At CF Webtools we've run into this same problem several times with multiple clients. It was so much of a problem that I needed to spend some dedicated time to see how we could resolve this issue.

The first thing I discovered is that this issue is a known "bug" that has been reported to Adobe. It's been a long known issue and somehow the fix which is in ColdFusion 2016 has not been included in an update for earlier ColdFusion versions. However, Adobe has affirmed to me that this fix is scheduled for an upcoming update.

Because it was fixed in ColdFusion 2016 I was able to inspect the included jar files to see if the one that handles CFFTP or secure communications was newer than the one(s) in ColdFusion 11. What I found is that jsch-0.1.44m.jar had been replaced by jsch-0.1.52m.jar. The JSCH jar library is the library that handles Java Secure Channel communications. "JSch allows you to connect to an sshd server and use port forwarding, X11 forwarding, file transfer, etc., and you can integrate its functionality into your own Java programs."

After seeing this was upgraded I had an ah-ha moment and figured it was worth a try to copy this newer version into my ColdFusion 11 test server and see what happened. The new version is in ./ColdFusion2016/cfusion/lib folder. You can download the free ColdFusion 2016 Developer Edition and install it anywhere so you can get access to the updated jar file. Once you have the new jar file copy it into ColdFusion 11. The proper way to do this is to remove or rename the old jar file version in your ColdFusion11/cfusion (or instance name)/lib folder then copy the new jar file version into the same folder. Then start or restart ColdFusion 11. That's it. You're done. The bug is fixed and you're good to go with SFTP or FTPS using <CFFTP> in ColdFusion 11.

This is not an approved fix from Adobe. I do not know if there is some unknown issue that could be created by doing this. However, I do know that everyone I've talked to that has tried this has had their secure FTP issues resolved. Additionally I have not tried this 'fix' in ColdFusion 10. However, if you are running into this issue with ColdFusion 10 it's worth the minimal effort to give it a try.

If you need someone to make this change on your ColdFusion server then contact us, we can help. CF Webtools is here to fill your needs and solve your problems. If you have a perplexing issue with ColdFusion servers, code, connections, or if you need help upgrading your VM or patching your server (or anything else) our operations group is standing by 24/7 - give us a call at 402-408-3733, or send a note to operations @ cfwebtools.com.

Connect ColdFusion JDBC to Sybase SQL Anywhere 16

This is something that might not come up often, but every once in a while we have to connect to a Sybase database. This is a built in feature in the Enterprise version of ColdFusion. However, if you have the Standard version of ColdFusion you have to manually add the JDBC jar file and build the connection string by hand. This is easy to do once you have the correct information and correct format of the connection string. Finding that correct information was nearly impossible and required a lot of trial and error.

Here's the case we had to resolve at CF Webtools. One of our clients has been using ColdFusion and Sybase for ages. For the record this is Sybase SQL Anywhere 16. For those that are not aware SAP owns Sybase thus the official name is SAP SQL Anywhere 16. For the longest time they were using ODBC connectors and older versions of ColdFusion on older Windows servers. More recently they have upgraded to ColdFusion 11 on newer Windows servers and were still trying to make the connections to Sybase via ODBC. This is a large multi-tenant operation in which there are hundreds of databases on the Sybase servers. Yes, plural servers. There are two servers that are replicated and handle failover. This means the ColdFusion Datasource connection also needs to handle failover. With ODBC failover is handled by Microsoft ODBC settings. With JDBC we had to setup failover in the JDBC connection string.

Read More