The next stop on our PCI DSS Compliance tour is disabling weak SSL versions and encryption ciphers. If your site is handling credit card payments, it is undoubtedly using HTTPS for at least the pages that collect payment information. I thought I had already taken care of this item, but I was apparently mistaken. Fortunately, this is pretty easy to fix and if you're on Windows I've even cooked up a quick and easy registry file for you to use.
As a web developer you have your share of demons you have to face. If your company processes credit cards, chances are your yearly PCI DSS compliance scan is one of those demons. I thought I would do a short series on a few security items I tightened down as a result of our last PCI scan. This is by no means a comprehensive list of everything needed to pass a PCI scan. If you want to know that and have time to read a 74 page PDF you can get a copy of the Spec at www.pcisecuritystandards.org.
A lot of you have web servers that double as mail servers to relay out mail from your ColdFusion applications. Even if you have a separate server that handles your mail relay, this post should still be helpful. The more and more that spam proliferates on the Internet, the more antsy ISPs get about blocking mail. There are a litany of reasons an ISP might reject mail from your server. GoDaddy has been one of the most annoying companies to deal with. There are two things I had to fix on my mail server before they would accept mail from my server. Reverse DNS and Helo host name.
I found an interesting little bug in the BlogCFC implementation of ColdFISH today. ColdFISH is a ColdFusion code formatting component that is instantiated once and cached as a singleton in the application scope in BlogCFC. The problem is, ColdFISH looks like it wasn't intended to be used as a singleton. It makes use of the variables scope to store the Java StringBuffer class it uses to gather up your formatted code as well as a number of other variables used to parse the code it is formatting. This means when two or more people hit a BlogCFC entry with larger code samples, race conditions exists.
Some time ago GoDaddy manged to get the IP address of my VPS in their little black book and began refusing to receive any mail which originated from it. Unfortunately for me, I use GoDaddy for my E-mail hosting and that meant I stopped getting all E-mails that were sent from my server. A couple weeks ago I got around to calling them to see just what was going on. I would rather mud-wrestle a large sea-sick crocodile before repeating this tedious conversation with their bumbling excuse for tech support. Here are the details of my correspondence with them.
Matt Woodward pointed out this Slash Dot article today about the accidental release of code from the Sequoia Voting Systems and a web site dedicated to studying that code. Apparently the Election Defense Alliance obtained a copy of the election data for Riverside County, California. It came in the form of a Microsoft SQL Server backup that was SUPPOSED to have all the code such as stored procs and triggers redacted. I wandered over to the "Sequoia Voting System Study Project" and scored me a copy of the data.
When you think of your production servers, you need to imagine them as your car sporting a new stereo in a parking lot with a bunch of would-be burglars milling around outside constantly checking each window and door to make sure you locked it tightly the last time you had it open. Every door, window, or keyless entry system is a potential point of invasion that can fail you. Why do you think those brinks trucks have no windows and the only way in the back is a single, beefy, padlocked door. A Brinks truck may not be convenient to access, but that isn't their goal. You need to control the ways into your server with the same gusto.
This is a really cool feature of ColdFusion 8 that I had totally missed but I stumbled across an article on Ray Camden's blog today. (Thanks Ray!) Basically, you can modify your ColdFusion Administrator menus to include custom tools of your own choosing. Several pre-built ones out there including SpoolMail, a nifty util to re-copy your undeliverable mail back into the spool folder; and Cache Clearer, an easy way to clear out specific folders of trusted cache.
I went to add a custom tag path onto my dev server this morning. Feeling a little lazy and not wanting to type in the full path by hand, I clicked the "Browse Server" button. There are similar buttons for adding ColdFusion mappings and searching for file-based databases while adding data sources. The Browse Server page uses an applet to let you choose directories or files off your server. I was greeted with an error message:
Server Error
IO error on server communication
I feel like a dork. I posted a tip last night on remotely managing services on your Windows servers. I wondered why it didn't get many hits, and I finally realized tonight that an inadvertent change in my server's time this morning effectively unpublished the post so no one could get to it. Doh. You can read it here now:
