Teen hacker infiltrates numerous FTP servers owned by the U.S. government

On Monday, a report surfaced claiming that a teen hacker using the alias “Fear” managed to gain access to hundreds of FTP servers owned by the U.S. government. The hacker initially gained access to one server, but then discovered that it listed the access credentials to all FTP servers residing on the .us and .gov domains. The .us servers include public data, private data, program source code, and more sensitive data, while the hacker wouldn’t say what’s loaded on the .gov sites.

FTP stands for file transfer protocol, and servers using this protocol are established to host files on local networks or via the internet. Users typically need a login name and password to gain access to content stored on these servers, which can be made public or set as private. Naturally, the government would keep its servers private, so it’s a bit scary to see that a teen managed to access one and grab the details of numerous others.