The original cloud service “FTP” is on the radar of many hackers. The FBI sent out an alert to medical and dental entities warning them to secure their FTP servers. Hackers are trying to access protected health information (PHI) and personal identifiable information (PII) through FTP. Research has shown that there are over 700K exposed FTP servers on the internet. Before the days of Dropbox, Google drive and Onedrive people would use the File transfer protocol (FTP) to move or copy data from pc’s to servers or vice versa. Now with cybercrimes at an all-time high this once useful feature is a backdoor to store malware and launch DDoS attacks.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fbi-alert-urges-companies-to-secure-ftp-servers/
This was a concern raised at my job this week due to the nature of information we deal with daily. Cyber criminals are trying to make connections to FTP servers in anonymous mode to allow write access to inject malicious tools. Preventive measures include checking FTP servers running in anonymous mode.
FTP, by itself, is itself has been always been concern due to lot of security vulnerabilities.When there’s a slow network connection, people often resort to using a proxy FTP which makes the client instructs the data transmission directly between two FTP servers. A hacker can take advantage of this type of file transfer and use a PORT command to request access to ports by posing as a middle man for the file transfer request.