As you scout for the most cost-effective way of transmitting files with your business units and trading partners, among the many file sharing solutions that will likely stand out are free FTP servers. Most of these software applications are already bundled (or readily available through repositories) in operating systems like Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, so they likely don't require additional costs ... or so it seems.

Not everyone using your web file transfer server needs to have a user account. There can be instances when it's perfectly fine for a user to just carry out an anonymous file upload. Meaning, that user doesn't have to login. This set up can be useful in cases where an outsider just needs to do a one-off upload. We'll show you how to enable that functionality on JSCAPE MFT Server.

Overview

How do you strengthen a server's user authentication system? Well, one solution would be to add another authentication method. Most servers authenticate users through the usual username-password technique. If you can augment that with another method, you'll be able to make it more difficult for unauthorized users to break in. For servers whose users connect through Web browsers, one option would be something called client certificate authentication. Let's explore what this is.

Data connection mode

When your File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server runs behind a firewall or Network Address Translation (NAT) router, your users may sometimes encounter connectivity issues. One of the most common causes of FTP connection issues is the data connection mode being used. This mode can be either active or passive. Certain firewall configurations will only allow FTP connections if the data connection is set to a mode that works with a given configuration.

This blog will explain the differences between active and passive FTP data connection modes, how they impact firewall configurations and what mode we recommend you use going forward. Although active and passive modes are mentioned in RFC 959, the explanations can be too technical. Before we tackle the main discussion, let’s first review how FTP connections are designed.

Overview

PGP encryption can add another layer of protection to a trading partner file transfer already secured by FTPS. It can also provide data-at-rest encryption as soon as the file arrives at the other end. In this post, we'll show you how to set up a fully automated file transfer secured by OpenPGP and FTPS using JSCAPE MFT Server triggers.

Overview

People who use SSL/TLS to secure their online transactions/file transfers are mostly only familiar with two of its security functions: 1. That it can encrypt data in transit and 2. That it can enable clients to authenticate the server. They're likely not making use of another feature that can greatly enhance SSL security even more - client certificate authentication.

If you've been following our posts, you know that client certificate authentication has been the subject of our discussion lately. However, we've never been able to talk about how to enable it on the server side. This quick post will be all about that.

Because Microsoft Windows doesn't have a secure file transfer protocol server built in, we've put together a simple and easy-to-follow tutorial on how to install an SFTP server on Windows. 

The SFTP server we'll be using for this tutorial is JSCAPE MFT Server, a managed file transfer server that supports SFTP connections and several other file transfer protocols like FTP, FTPS, HTTP/S, WebDAV, AS2 and OFTP, as well as SSL and TLS. JSCAPE also offers a cloud solution called MFTaaS.

Overview

[Last updated: December 2020] Malicious insiders and careless insiders are increasingly posing serious risks to file transfer systems. If nothing is done to mitigate them, these internal threats can cause data loss or, worse, massive penalty-inducing data breaches. In this post, we take a closer look at internal threats, how they put file transfer systems at risk, and what you can do to mitigate them.

In one of our previous posts, we taught you how to sync a Windows folder with an AWS S3 bucket. This time, we'll show you how to do that with a Linux directory.

Businesses that deal with large files such as high-definition videos, 3D CAD models, and so on, sometimes need to transfer these files to another department or to a trading partner located in another state, country, or continent. In situations like this, it pays to know how to securely transfer large files over the Internet.