Enhancing Your FTP Security

With FTP storage space becoming more popular and gaining popularity, especially around the blogosphere, it is important not to forget that your remote storage could easily be compromised. The simplest method to secure the date your working with, either during transfers or when your files on your server, is to simply archive them. This can be achieved with applications like WinRAR or WinZip, where you can just use them to archive your files and password protect them, not necessarily compress them. It is very difficult to crack an archive password, especially if it's a large or complex one. The most common technique to cracking such passwords is to use a brute force attack where many random passwords are attempted. If your password uses non standard characters and is large, then attempts that use this method will most likely be futile.

Some server setups allow you to upload archived websites and have all the files within the archive accessible to visitors and viewable just like a normal, un-archived website. If such an archive is compressed, then it may increase the time needed to access the pages of the website due to the server having to decompress each file the visitor requests.

A more complex way of encrypting all of your FTP commands and activities is to use SFTP. Not to be confused with Simple File Transfer Protocol, this simply means secure FTP, which is basically FTP over SSH (a secure connection). This is only slightly more complicated to set up than normal FTP, and your web host or ftp storage provider must have it supported by their server setup. SFTP encrypts transfers and commands that would normally be visible to anyone and someone with the know-how could easily intercept them and alter the commands to do their bidding. This could be anything from stealing your data to deleting it! SFTP eliminated that possibility by encrypting your access traffic.

SFTP is useful if you find yourself doing a lot of work with remote files, like blogging or managing your web empire on the go. When that is the case, you will most likely want an FTP client that runs from a mobile device, like an iPhone. Most mobile FTP clients do not support SFTP, but there are one or two out there that do. It may well be worth investing the time and perhaps money in getting one.

If you don't work with remote resources that often, then the archival method is a good idea because it is very secure and simple to do.

FTP has been around for a very long time and security is something that is rarely ever thought about when people are working on their sites performing uploads etc. For large, high profile companies, securing your FTP is vital to ensuring the well being on your data!