Modern ColdFusion Exploitation and Attack Surface Reduction

The talk opens by arguing that ColdFusion remains widely deployed in government, financial services and smaller businesses, despite its reputation. A rough search turned up tens of millions of pages, and the speaker points to several zero-day flaws in 2023 along with decades-old bugs that still show up in ransomware kits. The core question is whether patterns from past bugs can help predict where the next one will be found.

The middle section walks through three areas of exposure. Administrator interfaces have been bypassed through path tricks, such as a trailing dot on Windows, which can reach protected endpoints from the internet. Remote component files expose a wide class of risk: XML external entity issues, Java deserialization chains that kept surviving successive patches, and mass assignment that let an attacker write into protected variable scopes. The talk also covers server-side request forgery, where certain file parameters accept URLs and fetch them, with some affected functions existing in the open-source Lucee engine as well.

The closing guidance focuses on reducing what is reachable. Patching comes first, followed by ColdFusion's lockdown tool and sandbox to disable risky tags and functions. Teams that do not use remote components should block access to those files, and restricting admin paths by trusted IP helps as well. Egress filtering can expose SSRF callbacks, and endpoint detection offers a last line of alerting. The speaker also notes recent breaking security changes and Adobe's move to a paid bug bounty.