why does microsoft website allow anonymous access to its FTP?

Question

recently I tried to get into the microsoft website's FTP with as anonymous user and I was surprised to see that I got in. Does this mean that I have hacked that website? please explain

Answer 1

yeh but you still need to run wgv

windows genuine validation

Answer 2

Its a very bad idea to open up your computer to the Internet for the sharing of files. There's lots of ways you CAN do this but I'm very surprised to be the first here to mention that its really not a very good idea to do so. Especially with Microsoft Software out of the box. Good chance your computer will be owned by someone else within 20 minutes of putting it on the Internet. And that's not my statistic.... Yes there are secure ways to do this, unless you have an IT person available who's real good at security I really wouldn't recommend any of them. Find a outside service, through yahoo for instance, where you can setup a site, control access and control what gets put up there. You share what you want to share and your computer stays comfortably behind a firewall or two... My two cents...

Answer 3

umm so any user can use their ftp servers? file transfer protocol? anyway no it doesn't mean you hacked anything... you have very limited access as anonymous... you can only get to public files and download... if you think you are totally hacked into their system try to delete something or change something... try changing their permissions on root and see if that works out for ya... the answer is no it won't... ftp is just used to download files... was better and almost always used once upon a time for file transfers, that is before everyone just started dumping everything over hyper text transfer protocol or http ;)

Answer 4

a lot of software companies that offer free things (such as Internet Explorer) have anon FTP enabled.