I don’t know why I didn’t think of this early, maybe the bad round of gold today freed my mind! Get rid of FTP forever on your Linux machines! We recently got a bad Linux worm from an FTP vulnerability. FTP security has been a big problem for us lately and I think I found a solution. The good news is it’s already installed and running on most Linux distributions!

SSH, the secure shell daemon that all Linux boxes used today is the solution. You can actually do secure FTP through SSH, and it seems just has fast too. There are two popular clients you can use with SSH FTP. The command Linux version for Windows by Putty, and the graphical client FileZilla.

If you run old batch scripts on windows to ftp files you can replace the ftp.exe command in those scripts with sftp.exe from putty. Simply use FileZilla if you want the usual graphical interface for uploading web files and what not.

It easy, and 99% of all Linux based web hosting already supports it.