Over the past year we celebrated the 40th anniversary of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and witnessed multiple vulnerabilities exploited at the aging technology’s expense. For example, there was the incident at Yale University in which the names and Social Security numbers of approximately 43,000 faculty, staff, students and alumni stored on an FTP server were made publicly available via an Internet search engine for about 10 months. Then there were reports of an unnamed police department that was victim to a hacker who used FTP and telnet commands to gain access to a cruiser’s digital video recorder (DVR), which was used to record and stream audio and video captured from gear mounted on the vehicle’s dashboard. The hacker was able to control the hard drive of the DVR, enabling him to upload, download and delete videos that are often used as court evidence.
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