Tom the Lurker wrote:
Nathan Ward wrote:
On 14/07/2008, at 9:44 PM, Steve Holdoway wrote:
My pet hate is all these designers who just must have ftp access. Don't they realise that the ftp password is transferred in clear text over the internet? sftp is no big deal to set up either end.
Secure FTP doesn't save people who have poorly chosen passwords, which I imagine is what happened in this case, and is in my opinion a much more likely to be exploited problem than unencrypted FTP.
I agree, slack passwords are a crackers delight :)
And if you're not watching/analyzing your logs, its very easy to miss someone trying passwords. I had a case where a customer's site had a backup DSL link, which wasn't really used. We got a cacti threshhold alert that said "DSL link using four times as much as last week!!!" (400 bytes/sec) Turned out that someone was trying all manner of usernames/passwords against an AS/400 running an FTP server. And it had been going on for hours. The usernames/passwords were anything from simple admin/root/ftpuser/jim/bob/mary through to obfusicated things like r00t/5up3ru53r/passw0rd/3TC... Who's going to notice an extra 400 bytes/sec on a busy link, other than by monitoring logs for denied requests? -- Criggie http://criggie.dyndns.org/