Steven Frank has a great post on why you should stop using FTP immediately. He should know, as he is one of the developers behind the widely praised Mac FTP client Transmit.

This is going to sound a little weird at first considering what I do for a living, but I want you to stop using FTP.

FTP is a 23 year old protocol. Although the basics of what it does still work, there are many aspects of it which have not kept up with modern computing environments.

Steven goes on to point out some of the alarming security implications of using FTP, and makes some great points about FTP being a dated technology that has lasted far past its prime.

Unless tunneled over a secure socket, FTP is 100% insecure. Your password, and the contents of all of your files are sent in the clear, free to be examined or captured by any network hop between you and your server.

FTP has served us well, but it’s time to move on. You wouldn’t use a 23 year old computer to do your work, so don’t use a protocol from the same vintage. Demand modern transfer protocols from your host.

It is our company policy to only use SFTP and SSH to connect to and manage our servers.  If your host does not provide secure access you should seriously consider switching ASAP.  If you need help getting your site(s) moved to secure hosting, or want to stop worring about hosting entirely, don’t hesitate to drop us a line! </shameless plug>

If you are on a Mac, you can do no better than Transmit for SFTP.  On the windows side we recommend WinSCP.

stevenf.com

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TechCrunch:

Due to its popularity as a blogging platform, WordPress has become a prime target for hackers looking to take over blogs for search-engine optimization (SEO) of other sites they control, traffic-redirection and other purposes. Recently there have been a spate of automated attacks which take advantage of recently discovered security vulnerabilities in Wordpress.

To date, WordPress has been keeping up with the security holes by releasing updates within a few days of new exploits being found, but in the past few days new exploits have appeared that nobody seems to have answers for.  More…

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