Question

We recently had a hacker gain access to our system. They dumped some Coldfusion templates and included them in random pages on our sites.

The files they dump start with Allaire Cold Fusion Template and then contain what appears to be “garbage”, but I believe that this is some kind of pre-compiled Coldfusion code.

We’ve cleared out the hacks, but I saved off the files because I was hoping that there would be some way to de-compile them and maybe make some sense of them. Although I think the hack is dealt with, I am a little worried about what this code was doing. (When I looked at the source of a page that included this code, it created no output, so something had to be going on in the background.)

If there isn’t a way, that’s cool, I just thought I would at least investigate the possibility of seeing what these files were doing. Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

Wow, you have awakened some of my “old” brain cells… Way back when you could encrypt your ColdFusion templates and they could still be run on a ColdFusion server. This encryption was not very secure as the decrypting algorithm was readily available. It was/is an easy way to “hide” your code from the unknowing (I guess).

I did a quick Google search and found an old reference to a decrypt function on Adobe’s site that may help “crack” that code. AB Positive Encrypt and Decrypt I believe their code would have to be encrypted this way otherwise the ColdFusion server would not be able to read the files either. This download includes the cfdecrypt.exe and cfencode.exe programs.

If that tool does not work and if I remember correctly, the ColdFusion encryption before CFMX was done using something called CFCrypt.exe. That was an older versions of ColdFusion I think but you can try using that too. I couldn’t find it but I’m sure if you Google for it can be found.

Please post back with your results. I’m interested to see what they were doing.