Finding and Securing FTP Sites with Censys

This report explains how misconfigured FTP servers (plaintext logins, anonymous access, lack of integrity checks) present a significant data-exposure risk, documents real-world incidents including an FBI advisory and a 2018 MedEvolve exposure of ~205,000 patient records, and outlines detection (FTP banner grabs via Censys) and mitigation steps such as enforcing strong credentials, MFA, IAM controls, logging, isolation, and migrating to managed/cloud file-sharing solutions.