The original specification for the File Transfer Protocol was written by Abhay Bhushan and published as RFC 114 on 16 April 1971. Until 1980, FTP ran on NCP, the predecessor of See more

Communication and data transfer
FTP may run in active or passive mode, which determines how the data connection is established. (This sense of "mode" is different from that of the MODE command in the FTP protocol.)
• See more

HTTP essentially fixes the bugs in FTP that made it inconvenient to use for many small ephemeral transfers as are typical in web pages. See more

FTP was not designed to be a secure protocol, and has many security weaknesses. In May 1999, the authors of RFC 2577 listed a vulnerability to the following problems:
• Brute-force attack
• See more

FTP login uses normal username and password scheme for granting access. The username is sent to the server using the USER command, and the password is sent using the PASS command. This sequence is unencrypted "on the wire", so may be vulnerable … See more

File managers
Many file managers tend to have FTP access implemented, such as File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) on Microsoft Windows. … See more

FTPS
Explicit FTPS is an extension to the FTP standard that allows clients to request FTP sessions to be encrypted. This is done by sending the "AUTH TLS" command. The server has the option of allowing or denying … See more