Linda Musthaler, a frequent contributor to NetworkWorld, wrote a nice article (and a nice mention of Biscom Delivery Server) in the IT Best Practices Alert newsletter entitled File transfer solutions take pressure off email. She brings up great points about the issues with sending large files and the inadequacies of email, FTP, and thumb drives, especially for enterprises. This mirrors our view of email concerns, but she did seem to forget that Biscom has been offering an Outlook add-in for secure file transfer since Outlook 2003!
SourceForge is a well respected resource for developers to access open source software. One vendor ProFTP, who develops GPL-licensed FTP software, was just compromised. There’s something funny about an FTP vendor getting its own FTP server hacked – it has a paradoxical recursiveness to it. If you’ve read Douglas Hofstadter’s great book Gödel Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, it will remind you of the story about “turtles all the way down.”
Back in college, I had the original Mac on my desktop (upgraded to 512KB of RAM), complete with an ImageWriter dot matrix printer. That statement alone should date me, but let’s not dwell on that too long. StuffIt was one of those applications that was a must-have utility for maximizing the amount of data you could cram onto those puny floppy disks.
Well, looks like StuffIt just announced the ability to send files. It looks like it’s a gen 1 attempt – they mention using email and FTP, and even burning DVDs, to send the files. Good start for sure and it’s nice that at least they understand the growing demand from users to share their data.
Biscom Delivery Server already supports compressing files before sending, thus maximizing your existing bandwidth, BDS adds the ability to upload entire folders through zipping them up, which provides both data compression and retention of the folder structure. StuffIt doesn’t mention any ability to track and report on the delivery – did it get to the intended recipients? Did they actually download the files? Can you run a report later? Maybe their next release will address those concerns, but if you need that now, BDS can help.
I talked to Kelly Jackson Higgins from Dark Reading for an article she was working on. She’s been covering IT for a number of years, and her latest article discusses one aspect of a growing threat — the dangers of malicious software capturing FTP credentials and using them to hack into legitimate web sites. Because FTP is prevalent for updating web sites, having the credentials gives hackers the opportunity to inject their own code into web pages unbeknownst to the site owner. These infected pages may redirect a visitor in a phishing scam, collect user credentials on login pages, or spread the malware or bot to increase the scope of infection. There are a number of other vulnerabilities in FTP that makes it hard to justify as a viable file transfer solution, and this is just one more nail in the FTP coffin.
