Please note that this article is aimed at proving the FTP password sniffing is possible, and remind you the importance of encrypting your FTP communication and it may be illegal to sniff someone’s FTP password without notice.
FTP is very useful to share resources. Install a client, configure the FTP server IP address, enter the username and password, then we can download from the server and upload as well. It’s simple right? But have you ever been aware that your FTP password could be sniffed by a hacker?
Let’s check it out. I opened a network sniffer tool, Wireshark, and established a normal connection to a server. Then let’s see what we got.
Sniff FTP Usename Password with Wireshark
See the USER and PASS? They are my username and password. If there was a hacker sniffing my username and password right now like me, he could use them to login that server to upload and download.
Then, what should we do? We can use SSL to encrypt our username and password. I enabled Auth SSL and sniffed the connection again. Let’s check out how it worked.
FTP SSL Connection
We don’t see any packets with username or password because all of them are encrypted. It worked and nothing was exposed to the wild. Remember, we’d better also use encryption to help protect our password if possible. Sometimes maybe the password is not important, but the materials behind it are important.
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