Just right now I was reading a post on Slashdot in which they provided some great information on protecting yourself from hackers by shifting from FTP to SFTP. Slashdot says that 90 % of attacks are done by using stolen credentials of an FTP account. I highly recommend you to read all other risks at the original post. SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) will provide better encryption, hence protecting you from FTP attacks. Just follow these instructions to shift to SFTP, the credit for this goes to Slashdot again.
Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it’s safe to say that most users won’t be switching:
- Go to the “Hosting” menu and pick “My Hosting Account”.
- Next to the name of your website, pick “Manage Account”. This will open the Hosting Control Center.
- In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the “Settings” options.
- In the “Settings” control panel, click the “SSH” icon.
- You will see a page saying “SSH is not set up”, and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website.
- You will then see a page which says:
Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change
Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours.