Mass FTP Crawling (opens in new tab)

What device are you viewing on? I'd say "impossible to read" is a pretty wild exaggeration. Looks fine to me.

It is not my responsibility to email every single person running a sensitive public FTP server. It is my responsibility to educate those that have the power to positively influence the situation more than I ever could - ISPs.

There are 1+ million anonymous FTP servers on the Internet (https://www.shodan.io/report/OY7YoHou) and it's usually difficult to determine who the owner is. I haven't yet found a good way of notifying users, the best bet is to send the data to the respective ISP or CERT and hope for the best. On a related note: there needs to be way more attention on NAS devices. Many of them are connected to the Internet, poorly secured and in the process exposing huge amounts of personal data (not just through FTP).

For most people nowadays, "the cloud" probably doesn't have anything to do with accessing an FTP server... specifically not a public FTP server unless the cloud hosts are absolutely careless...

I remember using sites like http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no probably 15 years ago to find very interesting files on public FTP servers (but I don't think that this one exists anymore)

The amount is much higher as I have only tried a limited amount of keywords. There are many servers that have complete backups of the Windows folder 'My Documents' for example. Combined, I'd say at least half of it is not meant to be public, thus sensitive.