Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Adobe patches critical vulnerability in ColdFusion application server

news
Aug 31, 20162 mins

The flaw can be exploited to expose sensitive information

Adobe Systems released critical security patches for its ColdFusion application server, which has been a target for hackers in the past.

The updates are available for ColdFusion versions 10 and 11 and address a critical security vulnerability that could lead to sensitive information disclosure when parsing specially crafted XML entities.

Administrators are advised to upgrade their ColdFusion deployments to version 10 update 21 or version 11 update 10, depending on which branch they’re using. The ColdFusion 2016 release is not affected, Adobe said in a security advisory.

The vulnerability was reportedly privately to Adobe by a security researcher named Dawid Golunski, and the company is not aware of any attacks in the wild that exploit the flaw.

ColdFusion is a platform for creating and serving interactive web applications using the CFML scripting language. It is popular in the enterprise space because it allows the rapid development of applications.

ColdFusion servers have been targeted by attackers in the past. In 2013, researchers reported an attack where hackers exploited a ColdFusion vulnerability to install malware on Microsoft IIS servers.

That same year, a server hosting firm called Linode was compromised through a ColdFusion flaw, and Adobe issued two advisories about vulnerabilities in the web application server that were being exploited by attackers.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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