No Connection To Ftp Server

Data for 43000 at Yale winds up in Google search results

Yale University has warned 43,000 people that their names and Social Security numbers were publicly accessible for 10 months to anyone with an internet connection.

According to The Yale Daily News , the sensitive information was stored on an FTP server that was primarily used to store open-source materials. The mistake came to light only after Google introduced a change to its search index that included the contents of FTP servers.

There's no way of knowing how many people may have accessed the data, so Yale is offering those whose information was exposed free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance. Those affected were affiliated with the university in 1999.

Until now, the change to Google's search engine has largely gone unnoticed. With little attention paid to the contents stored on untold numbers of FTP servers, there's no telling what other sensitive data is only a search query away.

Quick example of script-based FTP operations

Notice the use of ftpCon there. When you do FTP operations in ColdFusion, you can create a name for the connection. This name exists for the current request only . It isn't an object - it's just a name. But once you have it you reuse it for further operations. This means you don't have to pass in your server, username, and password operations for future requests. The result of this call is a Result object. All of the CFC "wrapper" objects return a semi-complex (my way of saying not simple but terribly complext either) object that has 2 main components, a prefix and a result . The prefix is a bit confusingly-named, but it's the result of the "meta data" from the tag call. As a practical example that may make more sense, think about cfquery calls. Whenever you do a cfquery call you get a record set as well as some metadata in the CFQUERY "scope". It isn't a real scope per se but it's a structure automatically created. So for the CFC wrappers, the Prefix contains that information. Given the call above, the prefix contains what the cfftp variable would have. Given that, I can check to ensure I succeeded and then do a directory call. if(r.getPrefix().succeeded) { files=ftpService.listDir(directory="/websites",name="res",connection="ftpCon",passive=true); writedump(files); r = ftpService.putFile(localfile="c:\Users\Raymond\Desktop\test.txt",connection="ftpCon",remoteFile="/websites/test.txt"); writedump(r); }

I've got two calls there. The first list files in the remote directory websites. Here is an oddity. The name attribute normally names the query result returned from CFFTP. However, our result is in the files objects. But if we leave the name attribute off we get an error. I'm going to try to fix that for Zeus as it makes no sense. Basically - just give it a throwaway name and work with the result object files instead. Here's what that dump looks like.

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