Automated Mining of FTP Sites for Fun and Profit

FTP sites are the most mysterious off all internet resources. At one time they were the only means of file exchanges between users. Even though they are no longer as popular as they were, many of them still house interesting data and projects, some of which may be available through an anonymous login. People not familiar with FTP should think of the anonymous login as a kind of a guest access, when the user has access to all files which has been made available for public viewing. In this video we will look at how to mine FTP sites in an automated way using a scanner utility. We will use the Python language as it speeds up the development time and effort and is also very human readable and understandable. The end goal of this video is to write an automated FTP scanner which will take a list of ftp sites as input, fetch the welcome message (useful for finding FTP software version), logs into them if anonymous access is allowed, gets the directory listing in ftproot and tries to create a directory to check for software misconfigurations.

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Update: User Jabzor from Binrev forums pointed out an interesting article on the art of breaking locked directories. As these techniques primarily consist of sending commands such as mkdir, mfr, mto etc, it is easily possible to incorporate them into the current program using the ftplib.sendcmd(command comes here) method. This is left as an exercise to the user

Links:

1. FTP Protocol Basics

2. Python Programming Language Basics

Vivek Ramachandran is a security evangelist and has been working in computer security related fields for the past 7 years. In 2007, Vivek spoke at world renowned conferences Defcon (WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon (The Caffe Latte Attack). The discovery of the Caffe Latte Attack was covered by CBS5 news, BBC online, Network World etc news agencies.In 2006, Vivek was announced as one of winners of the Microsoft Security Shootout contest held in India among 65,000 participants. He has also been a recipient of a Team Achievement at Cisco Systems for his work on 802.1x and Port Security modules on the Catalyst 6500 switches. Currently he spends all of his time maintaining Security- Freak.Net , SecurityTube.Net and is the founder of an online startup (currently in stealth mode). Vivek, is a Bachelor in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.You can contact him at vivek[at]securitytube.net