FTP client

FileZilla Secure

There are two reasons why the FileZilla fork – FileZilla Secure – is brilliant. And, the first is that it's not hosted on SourceForge. SourceForge was the GitHub of its day. It hosted the websites, the binaries, and the code for many of the projects we took for granted, including my own. But changes of ownership at SourceForge and commercial pressure changed what initially seemed like an altruistic initiative into one that was riddled with advertising. Even worse, the advertising even made its way into some of the binaries as malware, seriously affecting the site as a source for untainted open source. One of the most important projects hosted on SourceForge was FileZilla, a perfunctory but powerful graphical FTP application. When someone asked for an application to make FTP transfers easy, especially on Windows or OS X where free alternatives don't exist, FileZilla was the recommended application. But because FileZilla was hosted on SourceForge, it became a difficult recommendation.

The second reason why FileZilla Secure is brilliant is that, despite many requests, FileZilla (the original one) still stores your password as plain text. Plain. Text. That means that anyone with any kind of access to your computer, including malware that's been secretly installed, can take your passwords and easily use or sell them. FTP security is bad enough, but this makes it considerably worse. The solution is trivial for a programmer to implement, and that's exactly what's been done with FileZilla Secure. It's a fork of FileZilla that isn't hosted on SourceForge and that encrypts your passwords. As a bonus, FileZilla Secure has also upped the number of threads that can be used when transferring data, potentially increasing transfer rates by five times.

Project Website

http://www.filezillasecure.com/

Don't risk using the original FileZilla; now there's a secure fork.

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