On Sun, 25 Jul 2021 18:15:07 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'The biggest security risk is that FTP transfers data in cleartext ...'
And passwords as well. There was FTP-over-SSL/TLS, but it was a nightmare to set up. As I suppose befits a retrofitted kludge. Best practice today is, if you need to do unauthenticated downloads, use HTTPS. For authenticated uploads and downloads, SFTP (which runs over SSH) is much simpler to set up than FTP anyway. If you need to do really large reliable point-to-point file transfers, like multi-gigabytes, an interesting possibility is to use BitTorrent. The sender creates a .torrent file and sends that to the recipient, and to nobody else. To make it really secure, encrypt the data file and ensure only the legitimate recipient has the decryption key.