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Dis­cov­ery of File Trans­fer Servers

The aver­age cus­tomer only knows about 18% of their File Trans­fer servers

While most com­pa­nies have a good under­stand­ing of where Man­aged File Trans­fer prod­ucts are deployed, only few com­pa­nies have any idea which of their servers have File Trans­fer sot­ware installed, where they are located and what data they make avail­able to users inside and out­side of the com­pany. The first step in get­ting con­trol over file trans­fers is to locate and eval­u­ate the servers in your net­work that are run­ning File Trans­fer software.

Why is unman­aged deploy­ment a problem?

This becomes a prob­lem as it has become com­mon prac­tice among end users to enable FTP on their desk­tops and depart­ment servers to share data with their cowork­ers. Free­ware or share­ware FTP servers can eas­ily be down­loaded from the inter­net. Most users have no idea of the secu­rity expo­sure they cre­ate when FTP is enabled with­out the knowl­edge, con­sent or imple­men­ta­tion assis­tance from cor­po­rate IT.

Best prac­tices for con­fig­ur­ing and secur­ing them are hardly ever fol­lowed, cre­at­ing gap­ing holes in cor­po­rate secu­rity that will not be addressed unless IT staff hap­pens to stum­ble across such a sys­tem. This is an ongo­ing prob­lem, as many enter­prises find new FTP servers appear­ing in their net­work every week.

The very pur­pose of enabling FTP on a server is to serve all data it can access on a sil­ver plat­ter to any­one that con­nects to it. Many FTP vari­ants by default allow full access to any­one (a fea­ture called Anony­mous FTP) regard­less of who the user is or where the user is access­ing the server from.

What can you do to dis­cover those systems?

Sen­try Dis­cov­ery™ detects secu­rity risks caused by servers you didn’t know were run­ning File Trans­fer soft­ware by scan­ning your cor­po­rate net­work and iden­ti­fy­ing every server that has File Trans­fer soft­ware installed.

As this is a recur­ring prob­lem, Sen­try Dis­cov­ery™ can be set up to run at reg­u­lar inter­vals and email the scan results to you. New servers run­ning File Trans­fer soft­ware will be brought to your atten­tion with no effort on your part. This allows you to eval­u­ate them in sec­onds and decide whether to dis­able or secure them appro­pri­ately, depend­ing upon the needs of the business.

Next Steps


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Intro­duc­ing File Trans­fer Analytics™




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